Visual Depictions In Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy

The inception of Dante Alighieri's trilogy, “The Divine Comedy,” stirred thoughts and emotions in thousands of readers over the last hundreds of years. One aspect that makes this book so revered is the fact that each individual reader gains a different, and varied, interpretation of Dante’s work. Consequently, a wide spectrum of depictions, stemming from readers’ provoked feelings, now exist through artist’s visual representations of this book. A great example would be Ary Scheffer and Gustave Dore’s different depictions of Canto V of Book 1 – “The Inferno” – where Dante and Virgil meet Francesca and Paolo. Scheffer and Dore create two separate ideas and emotions felt by the viewer with their use of different artistic details such as focal points, backgrounds and coloring, and expressions. Each paints the same scene, but provoke different emotions and expressions, dependent only on the artist’s visual interpretation of Dante’s words. To begin with, Scheffer and Dore have slightly different focal points within their art pieces. For
Scheffer puts Paolo in an appearance of agony; his head tilted back and his forearm covering his face. Francesca contradicts him, looking up to his hidden face as they cling together in the air. Francesca’s face radiates with the love she has for him, and a person who had read the book could tell that that Paolo was in agony for the evil deed done upon them for loving one another. Dore also has Paolo and Francesca clinging together, but Francesca is facing Dante and Virgil while Paolo is keeled back as if he was in pain; signifying that Francesca is regaling Dante and Virgil the story of their woe. The faintest of differences between Scheffer’s and Dore’s illustrations of the lovers’ expressions lead to Scheffer’s appearing as agony from love, while Dore’s appeared as misery from