Painting Dante
Blake responded instinctively to Dante; Botticelli did not.

By James Gardner, art reviewer for the New York Post & National Review
April 7-8, 2001

hough I will surely go to Hell for saying so, I cannot share in the universal enthusiasm that has greeted Sandro Botticelli's 85 pen and ink illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy in London's Royal Academy. Certainly we are lucky to have anything from the hand of the great Sandro. And the abundance of these drawings, all devoted to a single subject, is unparalleled, as far as I know, in the annals of fifteenth-century Italian art. Nor can it be denied that there are a thousand felicitous squiggles and daring arabesques amid the industrious penwork of the master.

And yet, for all that, there is something decidedly wan and underwhelming about the art. Painters, no less than poets, are occasionally in need of a muse of fire. Dante had such a muse and only a painter similarly possessed could do him true justice. Now of all the epochs of art, few were as cool and rational as that of fifteenth-century Florence, and few artists exemplified better than Sandro the dominant mood of the time. Even in his later art, created in the dark days of Savonarola, Botticelli can suppress the paganism of his youth, but he cannot muster any of the late-Medieval fire and brimstone that the dyspeptic preacher clearly favored.

In the very best of circumstances, illustration is a perilous enterprise, especially in proportion to the greatness of the work to be illustrated. Just as I have never heard Shakespeare's words recited quite as beautifully as they sound when transferred directly from the page into my mind, so any sensitive reader must find a work of great literary art to be necessarily diminished when shackled to someone else's imagination. Part of the problem is that, although Botticelli had many gifts, a powerful or irrepressible visual imagination was not one of them. His was an art of Apollonian perfection rather than of unbridled invention. And though his illustrations of purgatory contain some fine gryfons and winged lions, these are the exceptions that prove the rule. Beyond that, there is a certain sameness to many of these illustrations, often continuing for ten cantos at a time, as if the artist simply lacked the stamina to do more with them.

Furthermore, Botticelli has little interest in individualizing Dante's characters. And although there is endless movement in the scenes that Dante describes, the artist is no more capable of doing justice to that movement than any of his contemporaries could have done. Both in his paintings and in these drawings, he derives his sense of figural motion from Antonio del Pollaiuolo's very hesitant and imperfect experiments in musculature and gesture. As a result, there is a constant and unwelcome tension between the naturalism of Botticelli's figures and the clumsiness with which they are spirited through space.

Ultimately, it would be difficult to imagine two minds more mismatched than those of Dante and Botticelli. Because Dante (1265-1321) was a man of the Middle Ages, a contemporary like Giotto would have been capable of finely balancing the poet's direct humanity against his tendency toward vague generality. Giotto, however, like Botticelli, could not have conveyed the moody landscapes that are so essential to the poet, neither the dismal night of Maleboge nor the shrill brilliance of the Celestial Empyrean. Far better in this regard are some early fifteenth-century Sienese illustrations included in the London show. Through their rough, pictorial shorthand, they come far closer to the spirit of Dante than does Botticelli.

On the evidence of the illustrations that are now displayed at the New York's Metropolitan Museum in a fine retrospective of the art of William Blake, this famous poet and painter did far better than Botticelli in capturing the spirit of Dante. Unlike Botticelli, who seems at times to be simply carrying out a commission, Blake is intent on wrestling with his own vexed psyche through his illustrations of the Italian poet.

Though the two men were very different personalities ("Dante saw devils where I see none — I see only good."), Blake nevertheless responded instinctively and powerfully to Dante. Having learned the figural lessons of Michelangelo, Blake is a master at conveying movement, even if it is a sinuous and serpentine movement whose oddly streamlined grace is very different from the rugged power of Dante's original. Such is the fluid career of Blake's line that even stationary things are invested with this relentless sense of flowing. Though the term does not exist that can describe Blake's anarchic individualism, he has enough medievalism in him to be able to capture Dante's energy, whether he depicts the swirling eddy of lovers in the episode of Paolo and Francesca, or the tortured existence of "Head of A Damned Soul," or Virgil leading Dante up the slopes of Purgatory.

Of course, Blake's illustrations to Dante represent only the smallest part of his output. You will find far more than that at the Met. Above all, what is impressive in this show is that lovely mixture of calligraphy and drawing that characterizes his illustrations of his own poems: the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell," "The First Book of Urizen," "Milton: A Poem," and the Songs of Innocence and of Experience.

As the Met's exhibition proves, Blake was a wonderful artist as well as a great poet. But perhaps more than either, he was a strange and great spirit. And wherever this spirit alights, whether in a painting or a poem, there too dwells great art.