Illustrations by Doré and Botticelli
Alighieri, Dante, 1265-1321.
The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso: A New Translation into English Blank Verse by Lawrence Grant White with Illustrations by Gustave Doré.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1948.
Call Number: PQ 4315 .W5 1948
Stacks, Golda Meir Library
Botticelli, Sandro, 1444 or 5-1510.
Drawings for Dante's Inferno.
New York: Lear Publishers, 1947.
Call Number: NC 1055 .B7 L4
Stacks, Golda Meir Library
Doré has become fixed in many minds as something like the official illustrator of Dante... The trouble is Doré did not understand Dante. Nor was he alone in that: Botticelli tried to illustrate Dante and came up with sketches so curlycued and rhythmically lilting that they might do for midsummernight's dance of fairies. Both men did what they understood how to do without taking the happy trouble to understand Dante.
~ from John Ciardi's preface to Drawings for Dante's Inferno by Rico Lebrun.