While surfing an art gallery's website, I found a link to a catalog of paintings by Sandro Botticelli. This led me to one of his lesser known pieces (at least to me): The Abyss / Chart of Hell.
As such, I will devote this week's blog post to a discussion about this painting.
Sandro Botticelli (1445- 1510) was an Italian painter of the Florentine school. He lived during the early Renaissance, but his work has been said to be closer to Gothicism. Botticelli was relatively better educated than most of his contemporary artists. He read, understood and enjoyed Dante's Divine Comedy. He was so interested in this poem that he wrote a commentary of some portions of it and even illustrated some passages. Story has it that his obsession with the Comedy progressed into neurological disorders later in his life.
The Chart of Hell (1495) is Botticelli’s interpretation of Dante’s Inferno. We see allusions to the text such as the nine circles and certain clues that seem to tell us that punishment in that place is eternal. Something I found to be very noteworthy is that instead of being concentrical circles like the way I imagine them after reading Dante, Botticelli decides to depict these circles as spiraling downwards into the lowest one where we can see a dark and evil creature. My interpretation of this is that the artist wasn't trying to show Dante's description of Hell, but instead his travels through hell. In a way, Dante's voyage is unstoppable, much like a vertical fall.
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