The Doré Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy

Gustave Doré’s illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy are an unforgettable visual journey through nightmare landscapes of eternal damnation to the very core of Hell.

In The Doré Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy , Doré reproduces with excellent clarity Dante Alighieri’s sublime poetic masterpiece in 135 plates of The Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise; an extraordinarily vivid and imaginative account of the poet’s allegorical journey through the afterlife .

From the depths of hell onto the mountain of purgatory and up to the empyrean realms of paradise , Doré’s illustrations depict the passion and grandeur of the epic poem in such famous scenes as the embarkation of the souls for hell, Paolo and Francesca (four plates), the forest of suicides, Thaïs the harlot, Bertram de Born holding his severed head aloft, Ugolino (four plates), the emergence of Dante and Virgil from hell, the ascent up the mountain, the flight of the eagle, Arachne, the lustful sinners being purged in the seventh circle, the appearance of Beatrice, the planet Mercury, and the first splendors of paradise, Christ on the cross, the stairway of Saturn, the final vision of the Queen of Heaven, and many more. Each plate is accompanied by appropriate lines from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation of Dante’s work, including the phrase often used in a humorous sense in the illustration The Gate of Hell (plate 8), “All hope abandon, ye who enter in!”
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