Blake did not have time to complete the cycle of illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. He began work on it in 1824, at the request of John Linnel. We got about a hundred of Blake’s drawings relating to this cycle, and only a few of them were painted by the author’s watercolor. Seven drawings, the artist still managed to translate to engraving plates, but never fully completed one of them.
Dante’s poem so excited Blake that he independently learned Italian – to better understand all the semantic and emotional overtones of the text. The English translation, in his opinion, “robbed” the “Divine Comedy”, flickering with the subtlest shades of meaning. Here are the following illustrations: “Ugolino with his sons in prison”, “Antey lowering Dante and Virgil in the last circle of hell” and “Dante and Beatrice.”
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