And then the poet took me by the shoulder, and withdrew a slip of parchment from the wall.
“We are number eighty-and-three, let us go and find a place to seat ourselves,” that great master announced. He guided the both of us to a group of seated sufferers.
Poor, bloated beings, all anchored to blue chairs, their sweat forming paste on their red, sun-scourged skin, adhered to the plastic. Fated to restlessly toil for eternity as lethargic gatekeepers above bellow out number after number, but never the one that might set them free of this agony, here they wait, now hour after hour, now day after day, in a humid swamp of their own collective breathing.
“What is this beige furness of despair that thou hath taken me?,” I asked my Lord, “For after having witnessed the center of the inferno itself, even now, that infernal suffering doth not compare to that which I witness here.”
“This, my dear companion, is The DMV,” the great master informed me.
Mostra Palazzo Blu, Pisa 26 maggio / 10 settembre 2016
In mostra un nucleo di disegni realizzato nel 2016 da Guido Scarabottolo (1947, Sesto San Giovanni ), uno dei più grandi grafici e ilustratori italiani, che ha scelto di concentrare la propria interpretazione figurativa sulla prima terzina del Poema dantesco. Ed è appunto al tema della terzina che fa riferimento il titolo della mostra, “Smarrimenti”. L'esposizione fa parte del programma dell'iniziativa “Dante posticipato”, incontri, mostre ed eventi per i 751 anni dalla nascita di Dante Alighieri.
«tutti a inchiostro per timbri o matita su una bella carta siciliana che non viene più fabbricata. Fatti di getto, con grandi pennelli cinesi o matite da boscaiolo, strumenti raccolti nel tempo e conservati per occasioni come questa, quando c’è bisogno di un aiuto dalle cose»
The fact that Dante created the most popular image of the afterlife with absolutely no theological basis for it will still be the funniest thing to me
Church: Heaven is eternal connection with God, while Hell is total separation from Him. Anything else is only speculation.
Dante: Actually Hell has layers like an onion, and the devil is big and mean and also frozen. People are fighting and there’s a mountain to get to Heaven and a nice place for babies. Also I know this because I went there with my friend :)
Dante: I had a dream where I astral projected into hell with the famous poet Virgil who I am totally Best Bros with. I wrote a poem about it if you wanna read it idk
Several Popes: Thank you king I am commissioning fan art of you
Dante didn’t createthis image. To write Divine Comedy he used islamic eschatology (which, among other things, gave him the very idea of structuring his poem like this) and preexisting christian folk beliefs. Not to mention all the religious, philosophical and classical sources ne used for reference. Medieval writers in general preferred reinterpreting and assembling together preexisting material over original invention.
You can’t really get mad at ppl calling Divine Comedy fanfiction when you yourself say the most innacurate thing immaginable about it.
The funniest part of the whole “Dante’s inferno is fanfiction” crowd is that they seem to forget that none of the medieval Italians at the time considered the bible fiction.
I am trying to explain to y'all that Dantes inferno was not fiction. It was neither fiction nor non-fiction. It was a type of contemporary literature called Biblical Vision Literature.
can you move explain what Biblical Vision Literature is?
Dante’s Inferno was considered the result of a divinely inspired dream on the part of Dante. The idea being that god gave Dante a dream of all the things that happened in the inferno, which Dante then recorded in the form of an epic poem.
Oftentimes when someone had what they claimed to be a divinely inspired vision or dream, the nature of the dream was evaluated by a panel of priests who would judge the dream for how well it aligned with biblical theology. If it matched up, your vision was real. If there were discrepancies, you were a liar, or a victim of the devil, and would be punished. Biblical Vision Literature was considered 100% non-fiction for the time, angels were considered to be 100% real, and they would 100% give people divine visions.
I’m saying that there’s a shitload of historical context to this work that y'all are missing. Using the modern language of fandom to describe the Divine Comedy isnt just wrong, it’s actively creating an ahistorical understanding of an important work.
ok look. I think if we’re gonna go the historical context route something else that is important to note abt the inferno is that Dante wrote it after being exiled from his home city for backing the wrong political/religious faction in a power struggle. the inferno for all that it may be a piece of “biblical vision literature” is far more Dante‘s petty revenge fantasy where he goes to hell and meets a bunch of figureheads for the political party he disagreed with, who lament about who awful they were, one of whom explicitly states that the current pope, the one still alive and in power at the time of its writing and publication, is also going to hell. Any panel of priests that may have looked at this work would never have approved it if they valued their immortal souls (or more importantly, their pope-given positions in power). Dante, as a person in politics, would’ve known this.
I’m not saying this to argue that the inferno is pure fanfiction, but I find the argument that Dante meant for his writing to be read as 100% real and accurate or that he and anyone reading it at the time wholeheartedly believed what he wrote were visions direct from god is a bit inaccurate. Dante wasn’t a prophet and the inferno isn’t his prediction. It was a political statement couched in a Religious ‘vision’
Yes thank you! I was trying to articulate this but couldn’t figure out how
[image ID: a reply to this post by @/kaiasky. it reads: “RPF is still fanfiction!!”. “RPF” is lowercase. /end image ID]
in any event the statement that “Dante’s Inferno is fanfiction” is arguing against isn’t “Dante’s Inferno is biblical vision literature”, it’s “fanfiction isn’t real fiction”. anyone arguing that fanfiction isn’t real fiction because it depicts other people’s characters and/or other real people without their authorization? needs to consider that according to that exact argument, Dante’s Inferno isn’t real fiction either.
obviously not a compelling argument to anyone who’s saying Dante’s Inferno isn’t real fiction by virtue of being biblical vision literature! but definitely an argument known to boggle the minds of literature professors who’d never thought about it that way before.
March 25th is the day believed to be the start of Dante’s journey through the celestial realms of hell, purgatory, and heaven. Here are some pictures of my Divina Commedia with illustrations by Gustave Doré. Happy Dante’s day everyone!
today I learned that in 2008, the city council of florence overturned dante’s sentence of execution if he returned from exile. yes, dante’s inferno dante, who died in 1321.
but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.
the funniest part is that the vote was 19-5. five people voted to uphold dante’s exile.
