Currently housed at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, Dante and Virgil in Hell is perhaps one of the most striking and famous paintings of hell that was created by William-Adolphe Bouguereau in 1850. At first glance, the painting is representative of two muscular men who seem to quite literally be at each other’s throats.
Dante admired many classic writers—Ovid, Lucan, Horace, and others—but above all, Dante, like so many other Middle Age Europeans, admired Virgil. (Many modern writers and thinkers in the West have felt this way about Virgil too; T.S. Eliot regarded Virgil’s The Aeneid as perhaps the foundational work of Western Civilization, “the
Virgil in the Purgatorio. Why Virgil? That question needed to be asked in relation to the Inferno, where Dante’s choice of the Roman poet as Dante’s guide - above any Christian figure, and above other, more obvious pagan thinkers such as Aristotle - was surprising enough. But to maintain Virgil as Dante’s guide through Purgatory is even Summary and Analysis Canto V. Dante and Virgil descend to the second circle, this one smaller than the first. This is the actual beginning of Hell where the sinners are punished for their sins. Dante witnesses Minos, a great beast, examining each soul as it stands for judgment.
The Barque of Dante (French: La Barque de Dante), sometimes known as Dante and Virgil in Hell (Dante et Virgile aux enfers), is the first major painting by the French artist Eugène Delacroix, and one of the works signalling a shift in the character of narrative painting from Neo-Classicism towards the Romantic movement. It was completed for
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dante and virgil painting meaning