Dante And Virgil In Hell

Title

Dante And Virgil In Hell

Artist

Eric Glaser

Medium

Painting - Oil On Canvas

Description

"Dante and Virgil in Hell"

Artist: William-Adolphe Bouguereau (French, 1825-1905)

Title: Dante and Virgil in Hell

French: Dante et Virgile

Depicted People/Characters:

Capocchio
Gianni Schicchi de' Cavalcanti
Dante Alighieri
Virgil

Genre: Mythological painting

Date: 1850

Medium: Oil on Canvas

Dimensions: Height: 280.5 cm (110.4 in); Width: 225.3 cm (88.7 in)

Collection: Musée d'Orsay, Paris, France

Painting History: Acquired in 2011

Inscriptions: Signature and date bottom right: W. BOUGUEREAU / 1850

William-Adolphe Bouguereau was a French academic painter. In his realistic genre paintings he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body. During his life he enjoyed significant popularity in France and the United States, was given numerous official honors, and received top prices for his work.

As the quintessential salon painter of his generation, he was reviled by the Impressionist avant-garde. By the early twentieth century, Bouguereau and his art fell out of favor with the public, due in part to changing tastes. In the 1980s, a revival of interest in figure painting led to a rediscovery of Bouguereau and his work. Throughout the course of his life, Bouguereau executed 822 known finished paintings, although the whereabouts of many are still unknown.

Having failed on two occasions to win the Prix de Rome (1848 and 1849), Bouguereau was hungry for revenge. His early submissions to the Salon reveal this fierce desire to succeed. After his ambitious Equality before Death (1849), the young man aimed to create an impression once again. He put forward an even larger painting inspired by Dante whose work was much loved by the Romantics and who captured all its dramatic beauty. This painting was inspired by a short scene from the Inferno, set in the eighth circle of Hell (the circle for falsifiers and counterfeiters), where Dante, accompanied by Virgil, watches a fight between two damned souls: Capocchio, a heretic and alchemist is attacked and bitten on the neck by Gianni Schicchi who had usurped the identity of a dead man in order to fraudulently claim his inheritance.

The critic and poet Théophile Gautier was very complimentary: "Gianni Schicchi throws himself at Capocchio, his rival, with a strange fury, and Monsieur Bouguereau depicts magnificently through muscles, nerves, tendons and teeth, the struggle between the two combatants. There is bitterness and strength in this canvas – strength, a rare quality!” In fact, Bouguereau here shows great boldness. He is exploring the aesthetic boundaries: exaggerating the muscle structure to the point of distorting it, exaggerating the poses, contrasting colour and shadows, depicting monstrous figures and groups of damned souls. We are particularly reminded of the sublime visions of Romantic artists like Blake (1757-1827), Füssli (1741-1825), and Lawrence (1769-1830). Everything in this painting underlines the feeling of terribilita and horror: a theme to which Bouguereau would never again return.

Text Credit: Google Arts & Culture, Musée d'Orsay

This is a Google Art Project image, thank you Google!

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Additional image editing by Eric Glaser

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March 13th, 2021

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