Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
Pakistani pop singer Emira Mir posted this image to her Instagram with the comment “Beauty awakens the soul to act,” a loose (but standardized) translation of Purgatorio 18.21: Dante’s “tosto che dal piacere in atto [l’animo] è desto.”
See other examples of uses of the standardized English verse here.
“…I painted her body white because for me, living in this city we call Addis Ababa, we don’t need to fantasize about going to the Inferno—I have seen and experienced enough things to really make me question humanity. I have realized that in order to get ahead here, many people wear masks in order to protect their future. But while doing this, the reality is that I have seen the various atrocities and the great lengths that many will go to in order to maintain their success. So with that in mind, for me the red hands symbolize the guilt associated with the thirst for upward mobility. The cloth wrapped around Salem’s body is specifically from the southern region of Ethiopia, which has endured several centuries of oppression, slavery, and so forth. For the background color, I chose the off-grey because it reminds me of dirty snow; this reminds me of my childhood growing up in Canada, in the midst of the bitter cold, and also the challenges that I faced being an African immigrant in an all-white community.”
Retrieved from The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists by Simon Njami.
For more information on The 99 Series, visit Muluneh’s website here.
“The Wood of Suicides. Canto XIII, Inferno. These images were taken adjacent to campus, after the Malibu fires.” [. . .] –Don Thompson, d.t. pepperdine, October 2007.
Andy Warhol at Ristorante Dante e Beatrice (Naples, Italy) circa 1980
Copyright © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc
Stanford University Libraries
Contributed by Sabrina Lin (Bowdoin College, ’21)
In 1983, English artist Tom Phillips translated and illustrated his own version of Dante’s Inferno.
“Phillips intended that his illustrations should give a visual commentary to Dante’s texts. As he writes in his notebook, ‘The range of imagery matches Dante in breath encompassing everything from Greek mythology to the Berlin Wall, from scriptural reference to a scene in an abattoir, and from alchemical signs to lavatory graffiti.’ And the range of modes of expression is similarly wide, including as it does, early calligraphy, collage, golden section drawings, maps, dragons, doctored photographs, references to other past artworks and specially programmed computer generated graphics.
“‘I have tried in this present version of Dante’s Inferno which I have translated and illustrated to make the book a container for the energy usually expended on large scale paintings… The artist thus tries to reveal the artist in the poet and the poet helps to uncover/release the poet in the artist.’” —Notes on Dante’s Inferno, Tom Phillips’ website
Phillips also co-directed A TV Dante with Peter Greenaway in 1986.
Read more about Tom Phillips here.
All submissions will be considered for posting. Bibliographic references and scholarly essays are also welcome for consideration.
Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.
