Salvador Dalí | The Divine Comedy

Few artists can rival Salvador Dalí in the spheres of self-promotion and myth-making. So successful was he in these realms, that his art is almost obscured by them. There is a tendency in the collective consciousness to reduce him down to his moustache and a few melting clocks. So, we can be forgiven for forgetting that Dalí was, in fact, extremely gifted as both draughtsman and painter. Nowhere in his body of work are these abilities more apparent than in the 100 prints he produced to illustrate Dante’s monumental poem. In his depictions of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso we are confronted with images of tortured souls and sublime visions, executed in simple yet refined pen and watercolour that stand in marked contrast to the slickness of his paintings and seem to possess an uncharacteristic immediacy that belies their lengthy and, of course, controversial creation.

Dante Alighieri’s epic poem, in which his narrator, guided by the poet Virgil, first descends into the depths of Hell, before ascending Mount Purgatory to finally arrive in Paradise, stands as one of the undisputed masterpieces of world literature. Few works can be said to have influenced the imagination of an entire civilisation on such a scale as has the Divine Comedy. It is daring, visceral and continually shocking in its portrayal of the afterlife, and since its completion in 1320, it has not ceased to furnish other artists with inspiration.

Botticelli, Blake, Doré – Dalí, at first, may seem a strange name to add to the list. After all, the religious aspect of his life is yet another facet obscured by the artist’s own image-making. It may therefore come as a surprise to some that, in 1950, Dali was granted an audience with the pope. More surprising still, the pontiff consented to the enfant terrible painting Christianity’s most sacred of scenes, the Immaculate Conception. That same year, encouraged by, and perhaps not a little jealous of, this papal approval and to commemorate the 700^th anniversary of their nation’s greatest poet, no lesser body than the Italian government commissioned Dalí to produce a series of illustrations for the Divine Comedy.  Such was the furore created by this commission that some in the Parlamento accused the government of perpetrating a crime against the state, and in order to spare itself a lawsuit, the commission was rescinded.

One might expect that to a provocateur such as Dalí this censure would only serve to fire his resolve. However, the enormity of this task, the artistic labour it required, clearly demonstrates that to Dalí there was something more serious at stake. To turn one hundred watercolours into woodcuts is no small undertaking. Indeed, to complete the series, no fewer than 3,500 woodblocks were required. It took master engraver Raymond Jacquet five years to accomplish this feat, with Dalí at hand to approve each and every step. It is hard to not draw a parallel between Dante the wandering poet and Dalí the rejected illustrator, two spurned exiles too committed to their artistic projects to give way.

It has been commented that Dalí’s artistic vision succeeds most when applied to smaller works, that his self-described paranoiac imagination is charged and heightened when somewhat confined. That is more than evident in his Divine Comedy. Yet there is something else at play, too. Hitchcock, Disney, Coco Chanel: collaboration was an integral part of Dalí’s career. Meeting another’s imagination halfway allowed Dalí to slip his own claustrophobic concerns. And who can claim to have had as profound an imagination as Dante? Motifs we recognise as Dalí’s, his featureless faces, distorted limbs supported by crutches, windowed torsos, shattered, ethereal beings here transcend Dalí’s own Freudian obsessions to make us see afresh the horrors of Dante’s hell, the overawing visions of his heaven.

The Divine Comedy is celebrated for what has come to be known as contrapasso, the audacious ingenuity with which Dante fitted a crime to its punishment. More than any of the poem’s many illustrators, Dalí fits Dante’s vision. The inferno is to some extent already an absurd, surreal nightmare; in the act of translation from word to image, it is oftentimes difficult to pinpoint where the early Renaissance Poet ends and the Surrealist artist begins. That the two possess a shared sensibility in their conception of hell and purgatory as intellectual torture, body-horror and farce, we might expect. Dalí’s Paradise, however, offers up something we are much less likely to anticipate. The delicacy of line and colour on display here is unique in his oeuvre. All in all, it is something of a revelation.

- Luke Wallis, June 2021