Gustave Dore — the artist of a book: illustrations to the poem “Divine Comedy” by Dante Alighieri. “Inferno” — the tragedy as a leitmotif of the graphic design

Abstract

The article deals with the interpretation of the literary idea of “Inferno”— the first part of the Dante Alighieri’s (1265-1321) Divine Comedy as realised in the exemplary series of the French engraver, painter and master of the art books of the 19th century Gustave Dore (1832–1883). The author carries out an image-stylistic analysis of the graphic artists solution. The main objective is to study the synthesis of the visual and conceptual plan of the Commedia. Particular attention is paid to the specifics of the master’s creative method and his connection with the tendencies of the romantic art of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), William Blake (1757–1827), and a group of German and Austrian artists called the “Nazarenes”. The graphic language of Dore reveals a strong influence from the illustrations by John Martin (1789–1854) to Milton’s (1608–1674) Paradise Lost. The pictorial comment to the Inferno opens up new aesthetic values of the poem and represents one of the characteristic forms of its figurative vision at the present stage.