Italy: Rome pays tribute to Dante’s Inferno with visions of hell

Rome: Following the success of the Raphael 500 exhibition, the Scuderie del Quirinale returns with a new show marking another important milestone: the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri.

Titled Inferno and running from 15 October to 9 January 2022, the exhibition will comprise more than 200 artworks from over 80 museums, public collections and private collections from Italy, the Vatican and across Europe.

Inferno will document a wide range of hell-related iconography, from the Middle Ages to the present day, in what is hailed as the first major art exhibition dedicated to this theme.

Curated by Jean Clair, the “powerful, ambitious and spectacular” show will take visitors on a terrifying visual journey into the depths of hell, as imagined by artists through the centuries, accompanied by the words of Dante, the ‘Father of the Italian language’.

These visions range from the tormented and nightmarish to the romanticised, from Mediaeval to Baroque, up to psychoanalytic interpretations from the 20th century.

The exhibition also presents scenes of “hell on earth” and delves into the concept of salvation, as offered by Dante in the last canto of the Inferno Canticle: “…And so we went out to see the stars again.”

During the show’s first weeks, visitors will be able to gaze into the Abyss of Hell by Botticelli, on loan from the Vatican, together with a scale paster cast model of Rodin’s Gates of Hell from the Musée Rodin in Paris.

There will be other masterpieces too, by artists including Beato Angelico, Botticelli, Bosch, Bruegel, Goya, Manet, Delacroix, Rodin, Cézanne, Richter and Kiefer.