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Going Through Hell: The Divine Dante, an intimate show at the National Gallery of Art, opens with Dante Alighieri lost in thought. Poised between Florence and purgatory, the Roman-nosed poet glows in a 16th-century oil, the folds of his cranberry red robe catching the light. He is looking at something in the middle distance, out of frame. For a moment, he is lost to us, maybe even to himself. The effect is sobering: Here is a man on the outside looking in.
“So many of the scenes Dante discusses are of lost love,” says Gretchen Hirschauer, who curated the show. “Of longing for something that doesn’t exist anymore.”
What Dante longs for in The Divine Comedy is his home of Florence, Italy, from which he was exiled, in 1302, for corruption. Paradiso, the third and final book of the Comedy, captures the pathos of estrangement: “You will come to learn how bitter as salt and stone/ is the bread of others, how hard the way that goes/ up and down stairs that never are your own.” Dante is alone and, critically, far from home.
The poet is alone, too, in a Ronald Leroy Kowalke etching of Dante on paper, on view in the second room of the exhibition. Set against a deep scarlet ground, the owl-like writer stares out, haunting and haunted. The work is paired with the invitation from Dante’s guide, the Roman poet Virgil: “Let us descend now into the blind world here below,’ the poet began, all pale. ‘I will be first, and you second.’”
Throughout the show, artwork is paired with verse from The Inferno, the first book of the Comedy, to dazzling effect. The two seem to sing, by turns rising and falling but never sounding each other out.
“The sinners sank … the devils, who were under cover of the bridge, cried,” reads the wall text above Gy Szabo Bela’s wood engraving. Bela’s work is pitch black—all the better to depict a bottomless tar pit—but for a silhouetted Virgil and needle-thin hatches indicating the demons below, some wielding pitchforks, others smirking grandly, all awaiting the damned. Dante’s verse is alive here, bubbling up like the souls just under the surface.
It’s assumed throughout the show that visitors are familiar with Dante or can keep up with him. At times, it feels as if you’ve arrived late to a seminar. The professor will not repeat what you’ve missed, but you will catch up. It’s almost more fun—why not delight in the twists and turns?
Across the way in the exhibition sit Francesca and Paolo, the Comedy’s lovers condemned to the netherworld. Married to other people, Francesca and Paolo fell in love reading a book and, once found out, were murdered by Francesca’s husband. In the exhibition, the two are presented in Auguste Rodin’s “The Kiss,” a bronze of melded forms—lovers who seem to twist and turn before you: where one ends and the other begins is murky.
“We are one in Hell, as we were above,” the two call out in The Inferno. Here their sins follow them, as if maddened by a lover’s rage.
Flanking the sculpture is a William Blake engraving, “The Circle of the Lustful: Paolo and Francesca,” where the two are swept up in a dizzying whirlwind, a nod to their clouded reason. Here punishments are meted out with intention: Suffering isn’t just inevitable, it’s fitting.
Suffering drips off Robert Rauschenberg’s maddening picture, which hangs on the opposite wall. There, a tangerine-orange baboon roars alongside a starving child and mass grave, dabs of electric blue and fiery pink bleeding through. The discordant work seems to rupture before your eyes, teasing as it taunts.
“If one is illustrating hell, one uses the properties that make hell,” Rauschenberg told the art historian Dorothy Gees Seckler in 1965. For Rauschenberg, the properties of hell were images of suffering bathed in dense washes of color, torturous at every turn.
It’s Rauschenberg’s work, more than any other in the show, that reminds the visitor of Dante’s enduring relevance. Hell isn’t far off, the picture seems to say, it’s right here, and there’s no escape.
The clamorous work brings to mind other hells beyond what’s pictured in the exhibition, among them Treblinka II, the second deadliest extermination camp after Auschwitz. The Jewish Russian journalist Vasily Grossman worked as a war correspondent in World War II; his 1944 article, “The Hell of Treblinka,” called the atrocity “the last circle of hell,” a gesture to Dante’s Inferno. Just witnessing the terror of killing centers could make a man lose his mind, Grossman insists. “The children clung to their mothers and shrieked, ‘Mama, what are they going to do to us? Are they going to burn us?’ Not even Dante, in his Hell, saw scenes like this.”
What the poet saw is the subject of Jean–Jacques Feuchère’s work on paper, on view midway through the shows. In the softly lit picture, Dante is deep in thought, sitting in a muddy-scarlet robe, straining forward, as in prayer. Encircling him are forms swirling about—from the damned, cast in deep shadows with voiceless cries, to the angelic beings descending from on high, one after the other, as if dancers bathed in light.
In the oil painting of the poet that opens the show, Dante is holding The Divine Comedy, which is turned to one of the final sections in Paradiso. In the passage, Dante proclaims one of his great hopes: that his poem, or “sacred song,” might bring him home.
“If ever it comes to pass that the sacred song,/ to which both heaven and earth so set their hand … wins over the cruelty that exiles me … with a changed voice and with my fleece full grown/ I shall return.” Of note, the poet chose the insistent future tense “ritornerò” here. He will return.
The Divine Comedy begins with the poet in a dark wood, apart from the world and himself. By the work’s end, he is in a new place. His gaze, on second glance, appears wistful, even hopeful. At long last, the poet is on the inside, looking out.
Going Through Hell: The Divine Dante is on view through July 16 at the National Gallery of Art West Building. nga.gov. Free.
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