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Sandro Botticelli: In hell with Dante

June 17, 2019

In the 15th century, Sandro Botticelli illustrated Dante's 100-part masterpiece, "The Divine Comedy" and left behind sketches which continue to inspire cartoonists today.

https://p.dw.com/p/3KDm7

With his 100-part poem, "The Divine Comedy," Italian poet Dante Alighieri created a masterpiece. Almost 200 years later, around 1481, the Italian artist Sandro Botticelli began illustrating the work.

Botticelli's illustrations, many of which are now housed in the Berlin Museum of Prints and Drawings, show Virgil leading the young Dante through hell. Both experience how the damned have to endure torture. Whores and pimps pedal around in a river of excrement and desperately scrape the dirt out of their hair. 

Dante asks one of the sufferers what he has done. Another scene seems so terrible that Dante covers his eyes. Botticelli's drawings are so accurate that they continue to fascinate artists and cartoonists to this day.

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