COMEDIA: INFERNO
Ink on Cardboard 36"x36"
Winter-Spring 2009 I drew this one as a graduate project for a Dante’s Inferno class I took ten years ago. I divided the nine circles of Dante’s hell into 24 concentric circles, each depicting some sin and its poetically just punishment (from 14th century standards, at least). List of the Circles: Starting from the outside, working our way in: Inscription on the Gate: As Dante and his guide Virgil enter Hell, the pass under a broken gate that bears this inscription, ending with the familiar phrase “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” I was able to find the original Italian text for this line. Vestibule of Hell: Those who refused to stand for anything in life are forced to chase a banner while being attacked by hornets and wasps. |
First Circle: Limbo: Here the Virtuous Pagans spent eternity talking about philosophy, removed from the vision of God. Doesn’t sound too bad… I drew it as a collection of Greco-Romans and columns with a complete roster of their names overhead. The one at the top holding a sword is Homer.
Second Circle: Lust: The lustful are blown about by a storm, as they were blown about by their passions in life. Third Circle: Gluttons: The Gluttons lie in a vile slush as cold rain and hail fall on them. I depicted the Gluttons’ circle as encroaching on the surrounding circles Fourth Circle: Misers and the Prodigal: Here, the Miserly and the Wasteful push massive rolling weights at each other. Renaissance artists depicted this as them pushing money bags. I instead found coins from different regions and times for them to fight over. Each coin is marked with the nonsensical phrase “Pape Sata’n Aleppe,” to show the universal nonsense of money. I was able to find some very interesting coins to use, including an older Italian coin with Dante on it. Fifth Circle: The Wrathful and Slothful: The Wrathful fight on the surface of the river Styx while the Slothful lie at the bottom, gurgling. WALLS OF THE CITY OF DIS: This marks the boundary between minor and major sins; those who lie beyond are much darker and more evil. The walls are manned by demons (and three furies with serpent hair) who refuse Dante and Virgil entry until an angelic backup arrives. Sixth Circle: Heretics: The Heretics, who deny the existence of the soul after death, are trapped in flaming tombs. They don’t seem to mind so much, as they continue to believe that they are dead and that none of this is real. |
Seventh Circle: The Violent: In the river Phlegethelon, those who were violent against other people are forced to stand in boiling blood up to a level relative to their violence. Those who were only slightly violent are only covered to their ankles while those with extreme violence are forced to the deep end, being covered up to their eyeballs.
Seventh Circle: The Violent: In the Woods, those who committed suicide (violence against self) are changed into thorny trees with black leaves. Seventh Circle: The Violent: In a fiery desert made up of burning sand, the blasphemers, usurers, and homosexuals (violence against God) are punished. Fire and burning embers fall like snow from the sky. Geryon, The Dragon: Geryon guards over the Eighth Circle, reserved for various kinds of Fraud. He himself is a very personification of the concept of fraud, as he has the face of an honest man and the tail of a scorpion. The pattern on his back is one of my own design and depicts deceit pouring out of a pair of faces, interacting with the brain of another, and continuing to spread from person to person, as fraud does. |
Eighth Circle: First Bolgia: Panderers and Seducers: These souls are forced to march in separate directions, whipped by demons, as they drove others to their passions in life.
Eighth Circle: Second Bolgia: Flatterers: Since they were full of shit, they are steeped in human excrement. Eighth Circle: Third Bolgia: Simonists: Those who sold church offices and pardons for money (and in doing so inverted the mission of the church) are given an inverted baptism: they are planted face first up to the calf in rock and their feet are set aflame. Several Popes are located here. Eighth Circle: Fourth Bolgia: Sorcerers/False Prophets: Since they tried to see into the future in life, fortune tellers have their heads turned around backwards so they cannot see what is in front of them. Eighth Circle: Fifth Bolgia: Corrupt Politicians: Boiled in pitch. |
Eighth Circle: Sixth Bolgia: Hypocrites: They wear golden cloaks lined with lead, so heavy that they can barely move. I couldn’t decide on an appropriate hood design, so I instead just wrote out the Canto. How hypocritical of me to write when I claimed to be drawing these rings!
Eighth Circle: Seventh Bolgia: Thieves: Here, thieves are tormented by snakes whose bites produce different results. One man is turned to ash, another to a monster, and still another is bitten by a snake and then exchanges bodies with the snake, representing how the thieves must now even steal their existence and form from each other. |
Eighth Circle: Eighth Bolgia: Fradulent Advisors: Encased in individual flames.
Eighth Circle: Ninth Bolgia: Sowers of Discord: Those who caused schisms in religious groups are cut into pieces by sword-wielding demons. What’s interesting about this ring is its denizens. The guy in the top left is Muhammed, who Dante sees as creating the Christian-Islamic schism. At the top right, with a splitting headache is Ali, responsible for the Sunni-Shiite schism. Eighth Circle: Tenth Bolgia: Falsifiers: As they were a disease upon society, now they are themselves diseased. Ninth Circle: The Traitors: Those who betrayed their countries, families, lords, or friends are frozen in ice with Satan, whose three mouths chew upon Judas, Brutus, and Cassius, the ultimate traitors in Occidental mythology. Satan is frozen up to his waist, and attempts to fly away, but his constant flapping only freezes the ice deeper. Dante also includes the chained Titans from Greek myth in this circle, as they betrayed the gods within their own myths. |
I became kind of crazy-obsessed with numerology and symbolism while working on this. Dante puts a lot of focus on the importance of directions, saying that hell is made up of a left-handed path. I started to notice how the number 6 is made up of a left-handed spiral while 7 is a right handed curve. Is this why 7 is holier than 6, or was the symbol chosen for the number chosen to represent this? “Six is an unholy concept, so I will draw it to the left”? Strange…
There are six larger figures that represent some agent of Hell, not being punished, but serving a larger function. I set them into the design as a left-handed spiral, making the shape of the number six and following (if not exactly, then pretty damn close) the curve of the golden ratio. |
Dante and Virgil encounter Plutus near the Hoarders and the Wasteful. He appears as a massive and powerful god of wealth, clucking nonsense, “Pape Sata’n Aleppe!” When Virgil proclaims that he is nothing, Plutus collapses, showing how money is made up of nothing and is pathetically fragile. I depicted this “wealth and power are nothing” character as a Howard Hughes-like figure, insane, emaciated, pathetic, but wealthy.
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King Minos acts as the judge of the Inferno. A soul comes before him and confesses all upon death. Minos then wraps his tail around his body the appropriate number of times and the soul drops to the correct level for their sins. I took some aspects of Anubis from Egyptian myth and had Minos holding both a heart and a feather, to show how despite varying cultures, they are basically the same character.
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A great deal of Prime Number sets and other numerology came into this as I was dividing out the circles with my designs. For the Eighth and Ninth circle (including Geryon), I used the first prime: 2. I cut the circle in half, then in half again, and so on. 2,4,8,16,32,64… From the Fourth Circle to the Seventh Circle I broke the circle into three, then each of the three into another three, you get the idea: 3,9,27,81… And the First through the Third Circles are done by fives: 5,25,125,625…
I decided to depict each circle within each Prime set as being entirely dependant on that number. For example, in the first Bolgia of the Eighth circle, there are 16 whipping demons (2x2x2x2). Even the cracking of their whips is made up of 8 marks. In another example, in the final ring before the Italian inscription, five sets of twenty-five (5x5) souls chase five five-folded banners. Did I mention the toll that this has taken on my sanity? And now for some tales of strange coincidences associated with this piece. I drew the prime sets in on purpose, with the pattern increasing by primes up to 5. When I was finished, I counted the number of rings in each set and discovered that as the pattern is increasing by primes up to five, the number of rings in each set is decreasing by prime numbers to five. The 2 set has eleven rings, the 3 set has seven rings, and the 5 set has five rings. This was unintentional. |
The next strange discovery came later, as a friend of mine (while in a visionary state) proclaimed that the piece was “unholy” and contained a dragon. After looking at it, I also see it. From a distance, the heads of the giants in the center take on the appearance of eyes while Satan’s wings make up the eyebrows. The chains on the giants connect with the swords of the demons from the Eighth circle to form a snout. The concentric circles spiral outward, becoming the coils of the creature. After a bit of research, I found an ancient symbol from the Chou dynasty that looks eerily similar.
Am I subconsciously drawing these symbols, or am I merely finding archetypes in randomness? |