The Divine Comedy - Salvador Dali

To celebrate the 700th birthday of the Italian poet Dante Alighiere, Salvador Dali was commissioned in 1951 to create a set of illustrations for Dante's masterpiece, La Commedia Divina. Dali produced a masterpiece of his own, and the set of watercolours and woodcuts with their range of artistic styles demonstrates that Dali was one of the greatest artists of any century.

There was once an excellent site with all the illustrations and their relationships to the text, but it has unfortunately disappeared. Over the next few weeks I will try hunt down good reproductions of all 100 pieces, and I might have to break out the book to find some appropriate quotations. Some of the images below link to larger versions of the artworks; I hope that one day all will.

Three quarters a millennium has not diminished the power of Dante's epic, and one of the best translations is still that by Dorothy L. Sayers, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri the Florentine, in three volumes - Hell , Purgatory and Paradise .