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The NGA’s Latest Exhibition Considers the Art of Dante’s Divine Comedy

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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. 

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