Picturing paradise

Balletic grace, disciplined spirituality, eloquent economy, unrestrained fantasy and pictorial intensity: five artists took very different approaches to illustrating Dante’s vision of Heaven, says Martin Kemp

- Martin Kemp

DANTE’S Divina Commedia is intensely visual. His poetic language evokes seen wonders, ranging from repulsive horrors in the underworld to the radiance of angelic spirits in orbiting heavens. He is also uniquely conscious of how we see and know what we think we are seeing. Through the stygian gloom of Hell, he sees a distant cluster of towering buildings. From close range, they turn out to be a ring of huge giants, buried up to their waists. The dazzling glare of Paradise poses a different problem and his guide Beatrice needs to remind him that the rules of terrestrial optics do not apply with divine light.

Unsurprisingly, Dante’s imagery attracted illustrators from an early date, but their depictions in material pigments generally struggled to match the effects of Dante’s evocative word-painting. Here, we will look at how five remarkable illustrators over some five centuries have risen to the challenge of representing the divine radiance of Paradiso, which is much harder than depicting the fleshy reality of picturesque sinners in the Inferno.