Created in 2004/2005 with Marcus Sanders, Sandow Birk relocated his Divine Comedy to modern-day California.

It goes without saying that Doré’s model has been neither peacefully nor passively accepted. The relationship has often been dialectical: at the antipodes is the work of Rino Ferrari, who in 1964/1965 authored four large ink panels dedicated to the Inferno, after Renato Guttuso had gone beyond his template at the end of the previous decade, creating hundreds of updated panels and drawings.

Perhaps the most important cycle of visual works dedicated to the Divine Comedy in the twentieth century, however, is Texan artist Robert Rauschenberg’s: in the early 1960s he produced thirty-four “mixed” technique panels, visually translating the first canticle of the Inferno, using Dante as a way of voicing his personal vision of contemporary America.

Another interesting departure is Tom Phillips’ postmodern artist’s book, reworking traditional elements from a Pop perspective. Phillips also helped make the television series A TV Dante (1989) with director Peter Greenaway.

Illustrations of Dante’s work – Doré’s images in particular, not least his imposing painting dedicated to Virgil and Dante in the ninth circle of Hell currently on display at the Scuderie Quirinale in Rome at the ongoing Inferno exhibition – have helped turn the Divine Comedy from being first and foremost a “circular text” (that is to say, a text that, in the words of Roland Barthes on “memory”, spontaneously comes to mind, first at a discursive level and then, subsequently, at a visual imagery level), into a “circular icon”. Dante and his Divine Comedy are omnipresent not only when we think of the afterlife, travel or love, but when we conjure up the idea of Literature or Italy, concepts so vast and abstract that they would otherwise be hard to “visualize”. No one is surprised that an author portrayed by Raphael and Botticelli, whose work has been illustrated by Doré and Dalí, and who has been on school curricula forever, has naturally and pervasively found a place in intellectual discourse and Pop culture, including Disney comics and comic strips (e.g. Guido Martina’s recently republished L’inferno di Topolino, from 1949-50). 

The “circular icon” is not, however, the final piece of the puzzle. We move on to advertising, which from its earliest beginnings has exploited Dante-related images, starting with Olio Dante (the first bottles exported in 1898). Italy’s Poeta soon loomed over a technologically-advanced Olivetti M1 typewriter, followed by countless other advertisements of less epochal importance, including a recent Foxy ad, which everyone will remember (the work written on a very long and resistant roll of toilet paper), and modern-day campaigns by TIM and Magnum, which, it must be said, seem to have alighted upon Dante and the Divine Comedy more than anything else as a pretext to coincide with commemorations of the seven hundredth anniversary of his birth.

In short, the text of the Divine Comedy has morphed from being simply a circular text into a circular icon, corresponding to a shift from being a linguistic, already imaginative memory, into a “vision” and a shared mental image. Via twentieth-century advertising it has become a brand, through movies a hard-to-reach horizon, and more recently in serial narration a “topos” that continues to be stratified for its symbolic and environmental structure. 

The picture is a little more complicated when it comes to video games, because – and we may say this – of Dante’s Inferno (the first in 1980, the last in 2010) and its definitive departure from the original (which does not, after all, exist); and because it would, with current levels of CGI, probably be possible to translate the infinitely interpretable, traversable text that is the Divine Comedy into a total work.

These observations offer us some idea of how, in the era of globalization, reinterpretations of the Divine Comedy are now addressed “to various user types, ready to ‘freely’ plunge into Dante’s text, today considered more as a kind of generator of images than words.” (Casadei). 

And what of the theatre? In the midst of so much media schizophrenia, the theatre may give the work new life, miraculously combining the idea of a text (proffered) and an icon (presented) in a circular way, one example being the image and voice of Carmelo Bene from the Asinelli Tower in Bologna.