With Chris Wiscarson and Gregory Dowling
No poem in history has inspired more great artists than Dante’s Divine Comedy: Botticelli, Delacroix, Wiiliam Blake, Auguste Rodin, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali; and Gustave Doré whose extraordinary engravings brilliantly capture Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.
We will explore key moments on Danté’s journey, drawing out the Divine Comedy’s deeply sensual narrative, and how that has provoked very different artistic interpretations from the bizarre to the beautiful to the profound. We will see how artists have responded to: Dante’s precocious understanding of the universe; Dante’s relationship with the Roman poet Virgil, and the role of reason in life; and the Comedy’s underlying theme of love that is so exquisitely captured in Rodin’s The Kiss.
