F I S H I N G

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In Michelangelo’s time, everybody read Dante.  Greek mythology and Biblical thinking got mixed up even in the Church, and the pope did not object to the idea that the souls travel to hell across a Greek river.

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The post is partly based on a text seen at http://100swallows.wordpress.com/ which does not seem to be there anymore .

Added October 19, 2008

Woody Allen’s ferryman on the River of Death in “Scoop”.

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Now,  hell would be more  the way it was painted by Bruegel in

“The Triumph of Death” at Madrid’s Prado Museum or in Wikipedia. You see that the picture above is a fragment of the one below. Brugel often paints beautiful landscapes full of problematic people, and sometimes it is as if in his view the Earth would have been better off without humans.

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Best known are Doré’s woodcuts :.

The leopard is a symbol of wantonness.

Charon arrives to take the souls  across the river of Death to the Underworld.

Cerberus is the dog that watches out at the gates of the Underworld. He has three heads.

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And below is  Botticelli’s great drawing of Satan:

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Dante’s poem is called “The Divine Comedy” and it opens  on the evening of Good Friday in the year 1300 to tell the story of his trip through Hell and through the purgatory. In the end he reaches Heaven and meets his love, Beatrice.

At the time in Florence and all over Europe the civil authorities had begun to rebel against the omnipresent Catholic Church. Dante sided with the civil powers and was exiled for life.

He wrote the poem all in his exile. It was going to be  the greatest poem since Homer, even though in his vision of Hell there is every kind of torture to punish his  enemies, including  the Pope.

Michelangelo read Dante almost every day of his life.

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This is how the poem is planned :  one by one Dante and his guide, Virgil, cross the many concentric circles of hell and Virgil explains their meaning. To give you an idea:

As Dante and his guide arrive in hell, they are received by incredible noise :

“Babbling tongues, terrible palaver,
Words of grief, inflections of deep anger”

Dante wants to know what all that yelling is about. His guide tells him that the cacophony is from the souls of those who never took sides. They now belong to the crowd of damned angels who did not rebel against God, but did not serve Him either.

And the guide ends his explanations saying:
“Let’s not reason about them; just have a look and go on” :

“Non
ragioniam di lor, ma guarda y passa.”
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The painting of Satanas below is by Giotto, the one above by William Blake.

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The sinners are in chains. They are being led to the cauldron. The sinners are all very important people: a king, a bishop, an abbot, and two rich ladies. The sculpture is from a gate of the cathedral in Reims, France, explained and illustrated at http://www.paradoxplace.com/

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For a detailed Dante summary see http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/inferno/summary.

A complete translation is free at http://www.italianstudies.org/comedy/Inferno3.htm.

The drawing of the kid with his cell phone is by Gary Olsen at  http://www.dubuque.k12.ia.us/cartoons

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Dante is also the name of a  trend setter in video games. He wears a  child’s serious face and lots of story book clothes:

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