Paul Laffoley
(b. 1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

The Divine Comedy
1972-75
Oil, and Acrylic on Canvas
Triptych Overall: 73 1/2 x 220 1/2 in.

Subject: Medieval Cosmos of The Divine Comedy

Symbol Evocation: The Symbol of the Sacramental Earth

Comments: So far the classical forms of illustrating the poem of Dante have been confined to the media of painting, drawing, print making, and some sculpture, such as that of Auguste Rodin. Even one of Dante's contemporaries, the painter Giotto, who began the tradition of illustrating the poem, appears to have considered it entirely a painter's task. Since Giotto's time approximately 30 artists have attempted the illustration. Some notables include Botticelli, Vasari, D.G. Rossetti, William Blake, Ingres, Delacroix, Gustave Dore and more recently Robert Rauschenberg, and Joseph Cornell. In preparing for my illustration, I researched what has now become almost a codified tradition in the visionary genre. From this tradition two basic approaches emerged. First, no one by choice or circumstance actually finished illustrating the entire Divine Comedy. Both Botticelli and Blake, who intended to finish, started to work on it late in life and died before they could complete the task. Flaxman and Dore, who are often represented as having finished the whole poem, left out certain Cantos from illustration especially in The Paradiso. Many other artists often concentrated their efforts on selected Cantos only. Second, the iconography of the solutions have been either anecdotes abstracted from individual Cantos as examples of narrative art, or visual descriptions of the architectural structure of the three Cantica, singly or totally.

In my own work I decided to combine both approaches in a triptych consisting of three, six-foot square panels based on a mandallic-like structure. I show a cross-section of the conical pit of The Inferno (L'Inferno), an elevation of the Mount of Purgatory (Il Purgatorio), and a cross-section through the entire medieval cosmos (Il Paradiso), including the Celestial Rose. Surrounding each major image, in a circular series of panels (like a filmstrip), I tried by means of words, diagrams and anecdotal pictures to illustrate the entire contents of each one of the 100 Cantos of the poem. What I feel I have accomplished, to the best of my ability, is the completion of the two major iconographical thrusts of the ad hoc tradition.