Dante in the fine arts of the nineteenth century

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01/10/2017

Surprising as it may seem, until the 1820s people read Dante (he was part of the standard syllabus of Humanities) but no one painted him. And we will see that the idea of composing a large-format picture based on the Divine Comedy came to an ‘agitator’ who aimed to cause a scandal while remaining within the limits of the tolerable: we are in 1822, the agitator in question is called Delacroix, and his canvas is entitled Dante and Virgil. Before this date, which created a precedent, artists had limited themselves to illustrating Dante’s text in engravings, among them John Flaxman and William Blake.

CD-Book Benjamin Godard. Dante (2017). Translation: Charles Johnston.