Illustrating Dante
Illustrating Dante, 2015. Ink on paper, 11 x 8.5 inches.
Illustrating Dante is the first page, Canto 1, of my depiction of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy: Inferno in a comic or graphic novel format. This piece was my final project for the class Introduction to Italian Renaissance Art, and was inspired by the connections I made between the class and my own prior knowledge and experiences. I wanted to bring the flexibility and accessibility of the comic and graphic novel genre to Divine Comedy, an incredibly famous piece of writing that is not easily read or understood due to its textual difficulty and deep hidden ideas. My idea was to not only illustrate it, but to create a piece that could tell the story in an understandable, straight-forward way. Just like the beginning line, “in the middle of the journey of our life,” encourages the reader to recognize the symbolic purpose of the protagonist and his situation in regards to their own life, I hope that my piece would allow for others to be able to enjoy and live Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno themselves.