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Welcome to my (brief) interpretation of Dante's Inferno. For people who
don't know about the Inferno, here's a brief introduction to Dante and
his work. Dante AlighieriDante Alighieri was a Florentine poet, statesman and warrior. Born in 1265 into an aristocratic, if not very wealthy, family, he was well educated and became an active member of Florentine society. At the time, Italy was in a state of disarray, and was fractured into a series of provinces, each ruled from a major city. Within Florence, political turmoil also flourished. The major players of the city were split into two factions, the Guelphs and the Ghibbelines. The Ghibellines were eventually expelled from the city, and the Guelphs fractured into two seperate groups, the Blacks and the Whites, of which Dante was a member of the Whites. In 1302, he was expelled from Florence, along with the other Whites. He spent most of his remaining years wandering the Italian countryside, and boarding with friends, whilst committing to paper his great works of poetry. To the consternation of most scholars, Dante wrote his works in the vulgar Italian, rather than the Latin, which was preferred at the time. In this way, he hoped for the common person to read his work. The Divine ComedyHis most famous poem is The Divine Comedy. This consists of three parts, Inferno,Purgatory, and Paradise. The poem consists of various levels of meaning. On the literal level, the poem describes one man's journey through Hell, up the Mount of Purgatory, and into Heaven. On the allegorical level, it it the journey of the human soul from sin, to redemption, to eternal bliss. On another level, the Divine Comedy is one man's search for his lost love. The final scenes of Paradise involve Dante seeing the figure of Beatrice. Throughout the Comedy, Beatrice is representative of Dante's love. Beatrice was actually a woman that Dante knew in Florence, and she is mentioned in another of his works, The Convivio. The InfernoThe Inferno is the first of the Canticles (Books) of Dante's Divine Comedy. It tells how Dante, at the midpoint of his life, finds himself in a dark forest, which he cannot find his way out of. He finds a tall mountain (Mount Purgatory), but the way up it is barred. Instead, he meets the poet Virgil, who represents the poetry of the human spirit without God (Virgil was born before the coming of Christ, hence, he cannot have received the redemption afforded to humankind by the coming of Christ). Virgil leads Dante into Hell, on his way to Mount Purgatory and on to the Paradise. About my Imagine the Inferno projectOther than reading literature, one of my other hobbies is messing around with 3D rendering (e.g. the chapel image on the previous page). Combining the two led to this project - The Inferno 3D Image pages. However, due to lack of both time and money (and some would say, talent!), the images aren't great. Nevertheless, I am endeavouring to produce more images (as you will see, I have only produced a few so far). Anyway, have a look, the pictures are accompanied by some of the poem, and my own comments. They follow (roughly) the flow of the book, with certain sections being featured. For those who are interested, the pictures were rendered on my Amiga 1200 with 68030@33MHz, with 8Mb RAM, using Imagine 3.0 from Impulse. They were originally rendered at a resolution of 1200x800 (I think!), in 16 million colours. Naturally, for your downloading convenience, I cut them down to 320x256 in 256 colours..... Some LinksDante's Inferno |
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