Dante Alighieri was one of the first artists to make an utterly frightening literary description of the Catholic hell and its nine circles in which monsters and demons reigned, and souls were condemned. The Divine Comedy is an allegory about sin and redemption and was illustrated in its first editions by William Blake and Gustave Dore, it is understandable that this epic tale would appeal to a superstitious old Catholic like the eccentric Salvador Dali.
In 1965 was the 700th anniversary of Dante Alighieri’s birth, so the Italian government began to prepare several celebrations and commemorations to honor the writer well in advance, for example, in 1957 they invited Salvador Dalí to begin a project for a series of more than 100 watercolor illustrations to accompany a new edition of The Divine Comedy, the surrealist artist gladly accepted and set to work on this wonderful project.
However, when the first of Dalí’s paintings were exhibited at the Palazzo Pallavicini in Rome, the more conservative Italian audience was visibly upset by the fact that this project was commissioned by a Spanish painter and not an Italian one. The government did not establish a clear position, but gradually abandoned the project, Dalí for his part, was unperturbed and worked hard until the last illustration of this project was finished, regardless of the Italian government’s validation.
In 1964, Dalí approached his French publisher, Joseph Foret, who was producing a volume of Dalí’s illustrations to accompany a new edition of Don Quixote de la Mancha. Dalí suggested the idea of publishing his illustrations in a new edition of Dante’s epic poem. Foret took the selection of Dalí’s watercolors to the publisher Les Heures Claires, and they were quite enthusiastic about the idea. Raymond Jacquet and his assistant, Mr. Taricco, were the workshop owners hired to hand-carve the 3,500 blocks of wood needed to reproduce Dali’s watercolors.
Dalí’s illustrations show many of his characteristic style images; long limbs, “melted” faces, and dreamlike elements. Dalí admired the graphic and artistic work of his predecessors; Dore and Blake, but he did not use them as inspiration or reference, on the contrary, he made a series of completely surrealistic illustrations of hell, narrating the poet’s journey through the gates of the underworld to the nine circles of hell.
Currently, some complete and incomplete pieces of this collection of illustrations can be purchased on the Internet at very high prices, as well as a limited edition of the book in Italian illustrated by Dalí.
Story originally published in Spanish in Cultura Colectiva
