Easter is next Sunday. Dante’s Divine Comedy, a trilogy that includes Inferno, starts on the night before Good Friday and ends after Sunday, as Dante emerges from Paradise. Literary experts calculated that Easter Sunday that year was March 25th, 1300. Dante completed his magna opus in 1321.
One of the books I chose to re-read during this pandemic is Dante’s Inferno. My plan is to ration it to one canto per day. The book contains 34 sections or cantos (technically 33 cantos preceded by an introductory one). So if I’m disciplined, I will be done in just over a month. If our quarantine continues then —which probably will— I’ll move on to Purgatory and Paradise, a meaningful total of 100 days.
As a kid I was inspired —and terrified— by Gustav Doré’s virtuosic Inferno illustrations. As a teenager I was attracted to William Blake’s quasi erotic renderings of the sufferings in Hell. But this time I will follow Dante’s text with the illustrations that Sandro Botticelli created in the 1480s. They are fresh, cinematic, comic strips without speech bubbles. Since most of them were left unfinished (uncolored), my interest focuses on the grace and dexterity of Botticelli’s lines. Lines so thoughtful.
— New York City, 4/7/2020