The drawings were commissioned by his patron and friend Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici (1463-1503), a prominent figure in Renaissance Florence during the second half of the 15th century, and they came to us incomplete (seven drawings in the Vatican City and 85 in Berlin) and, so we believe, unfinished, as confirmed by the sketch-like nature of most of the drawings.

However, among the 102 drawings thought to have been produced for Lorenzo, there is an illustration for each canto of the three parts of the poem (Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise), a second portrait of Lucifer and an image of the structure of Dante’s Inferno, the famous ‘Abyss of Hell.’

Also part of the exhibition is a facsimile reproduction of the manuscript of The Divine Comedy known as Dante Urbinate. The illustrations from the original book, produced between the late 15th and 16th centuries, on high quality parchment, are regarded as an absolute masterpiece of the art of illumination and follow the medieval tradition in the relationship between text and image: the first occupies a prominent place in the folios, while the illuminations are at the edges, in the initials or in detailed framed scenes (miniatures).

All the manuscripts displayed in this exhibition follow this rule, with the exception of the two parchments that on one side show Botticelli’s drawings, freely composed and covering the whole page, and on the other side hold the text relating to the cantos, copied by Niccolò Mangona, suggesting that this set of drawings would have been part of a project for a unique and revolutionary manuscript book that, for reasons unknown, was never finished.

Dating to the late 15th and 16th centuries, the printed copies shown in this exhibition bear witness to this genuine revolution in the way books were produced, facilitating greater dissemination and accessibility to any literary work. They also reveal that the success of The Divine Comedy led to commentaries by authors who sought to interpret the work in light of the theories and issues of their time. This was the case with Cristoforo Landino, who was inspired by Neoplatonism to convey his vision of Dante’s poem. And Antonio Manetti, an architect and mathematician, was the author of the first topographic representation of the Inferno as described by Dante, seeking scientific confirmation of the facts related in the Bible, as was common among scholars from the Renaissance period on.

Indeed, in Romanticism, which cast an eye back to the Middle Ages, Dante was a central figure, inspiring artists such as William Blake (1757-1827) and Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863). Others, such as Gustave Doré (1832-1883), offered a new approach to illustrating Dante’s poem, to the delight of the general public, or fell under the spell of the poet himself, not just his work, as was the case with the pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), who imagined in pictorial form Dante’s dream on the day of the death of his beloved Beatrice, in the oil painting from 1880 which belongs to Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection.

For artists like Rodin and Lalique, albeit in different areas of work, Dante’s poem was a means of trying out new ideas and not necessarily following the text of the Commedia to the letter.

For the artist, the drawings shown here are effectively a single drawing – the sculpture can also be regarded as being part of this drawing – always the same, condensing and reducing the references and citations it evokes, from literature and painting.

In each of the drawings on display, various periods and disciplines dissolve and merge in a complex play of references to artworks, philosophers, philosophical texts, writers and literary works.