Dante Alighieri @dante-alighieri - Tumblr Blog

Ezio Anichini (1886-1948) was a Florentine artist and illustrator who had a real knack for doing images from Dante’s works on postcards. These may date from the 600th anniversary of Dante’s death in 1921.

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Dante and Virgil in the Sixth Circle of Hell ~ Paolo Pasquini

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Henri-Jean Guillaume Martin, Paolo Malatesta et Francesca da Rimini aux enfers

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Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarca, Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze.

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Bartolomeo di Fruosino c. 1430-1435

Inferno, from the Divine Comedy by Dante (Folio 1v)

...an opera in 4 acts, composed in 1889.

Download the music sheet here.

Tonight at 7pm CET

#dante #Dante Alighieri #opera #opera tag #livestream #Benjamin Godard

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Illustration from Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, “Inferno”, Canto Ix. 28, ~ by Franz von Bayros, 1921…

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Donn P. Crane (1878 - 1944) - Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy

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The first time I saw this, I sat under it and got teary eyed because it’s beautiful and I’m ridiculously emotional and Dante wakes all sorts of feelings in me.

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Salvatore Postiglione - Dante e Beatrice

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Why is Virgil Dante’s guide?

I understand this is Dante’s way of paying homage to the great poet. But why make Virgil be kicked out of heaven? Couldn’t he have been a heavenly guide?

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Well, Virgil was not kicked out of heaven in order to be Dante’s guide. In fact, Virgil was not allowed into heaven in the first place, because he was not baptised and was not a Christian; but since he was a virtuous pagan his afterlife was the limbo, instead of hell, together will all the other people who were born before Christ, but had committed no sins. (The only exception to this is Statius, in Purgatory).

Virgil, as an allegory of reason, is not allowed into heaven. He can guide Dante’s mind and intellect, but cannot grasp the concept of God through theology, which is why he leaves and Beatrice becomes Dante’s guide in heaven.

As to why it is Virgil specifically, in Medieval culture he had a certain renown, not only as a poet but also a sort of “prophet” of Christianity. The reason is the prophecy in the IV Eclogue, that talks about the famous puer, a child figure that has been wrongly interpreted as an annunciation of the coming of Christ. The child was in fact the unborn son of Asinius Pollio, Virgil’s protector. Thus the belief that Virgil had seen the “truth of Christianity” and had written it in his poetry without realising it was a rather common belief. Dante is only following an already known path, adding to it his own personal admiration for Virgil as a poet and a master of philosophy, a kind of admiration that was also shared by the majority of people in that period of time.