William Blake's Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’: The Complete Drawings

William Blake’s Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’: The Complete Drawings collects all 102 of Blake’s illustrations for Dante’s epic poem, from pencil sketches to finished watercolors, alongside key excerpts from the text. Detailed readings and close-up reproductions examine the illustrations and their themes of love, guilt, punishment, revenge, and redemption.

Completed in 1321 by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), The Divine Comedy is a major work of Italian literature. It follows Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, representing the soul’s path toward salvation.

Blake created the illustrations during the final years of his life. The drawings range from infernal suffering and human disfigurement to celestial light and idealized physical form. While closely following Dante’s text, Blake also brought his own perspective to its central themes. Left in various stages of completion at his death, the original works are dispersed among seven institutions. This edition brings them together in print.

Two introductory essays examine Dante and Blake, as well as other artists inspired by The Divine Comedy, including Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, Eugène Delacroix, Gustave Doré, and Auguste Rodin.

BOOK DETAILS

BINDING: hardcover
PAGES: 464
DIMENSIONS: 6.7 × 9.4 in.
WEIGHT: 3.52 lb
LANGUAGE: English
AUTHORS: Maria Antonietta Terzoli and Sebastian Schütze
PUBLISHER: TASCHEN
ISBN: 978-3-8365-6863-0

ABOUT WILLIAM BLAKE

William Blake (1757–1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker whose work connected literature, visual art, and spiritual inquiry. His illustrated books combined original poetry with images through a relief-etching process he developed. Biblical narratives, mythology, and his own symbolic figures recur throughout his work. His illustrations for Dante’s The Divine Comedy were among the projects he worked on in the final years of his life.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Maria Antonietta Terzoli studied in Pavia, Bologna, and Geneva and taught at the universities of Geneva and Zurich. TASCHEN’s author biography identifies her as a professor at the University of Basel since 1991 and head of its department of Italian Studies. A philologist and interpreter of literary texts, she specializes in Italian literature.

Sebastian Schütze was a longtime research fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History) in Rome. TASCHEN’s author biography lists his membership on the academic board of the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples and in the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. From 2003 to 2009, he held the Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queen’s University in Kingston. In 2009, he was appointed professor of early modern art history at Vienna University.