No Italian schoolchild seems to be able to escape these two characters from literary history: One is Pinocchio, the good-natured but unreliable child who gets from one bad adventure to the next and has to be rescued by a fairy again and again. The other is Dante, the medieval poet who went through hell in his “Divine Comedy”, from the top floor where “sinners out of excess” atone down to the devil stuck in the ice. He finally came out in heaven. “Dante is ours,” said Pope Francis when he commemorated the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death with an apostolic letter last spring. “Each of us,” said director and actor Roberto Benigni on the same occasion, “feels that there is an immortal spark in us, and Dante knows it too.” One spoke for the Catholic Church, the other for the Italians, but the “we” should be far greater than the intersection between the two.
There is no escape here. Hell is there
In the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, the former royal stables of a former papal residence, an exhibition on the visual history of the “Inferno” is currently being shown, the first part of the “Divina Commedia” – and whether the cruelty it unfolds is the most impressive. The show, the last major event in a long series of events dedicated to Dante this year, is monumental not only because of its more than two hundred exhibits: it opens with a plaster cast of the “Gate of Hell” (1917), which was made by the sculptor Auguste Rodin became an unresolved life’s work, and although it was more than six meters high and weighed several tons, it was specially brought from Paris. Next to it is Fra Angelico’s winged altar “Last Judgment” (1425), one of the classic depictions of the cosmic division into heaven and hell, redemption and damnation. And what follows in the next rooms, starting with pictures by Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Huys or Jan Brueghel the Elder. Ä., Is more than a representative selection of views of Hell from the early modern period. A world of twisted and torn human bodies, of devils and monsters is presented in these rooms, so comprehensively that every visitor understands: There is no escape here. Hell is there.
Hell is not provided for in the creed, nor is the devil. It is a late invention and a counterpart to heaven. It was not until the end of the Middle Ages, beginning in the 11th and 12th centuries, that it gained a face, and it did so with the help of art. To the same extent as the power and glory of heaven grow, so does the counterpart. As ordered as God’s world appears, from the highest angels down to the smallest earth worm, it is also systematic in the kingdom of evil: Every sin is assigned a punishment that reflects the offense in its own way, which is why the unfortunate do not believed in the immortality of the soul, must lie in glowing coffins for all eternity. Incidentally, the punishments do not prevent the condemned from engaging in long conversations with the visitors. Occasionally this hell seems to be cooked at low temperature.
The show opens with a plaster cast of the “Hell Gate” (1917), which the sculptor Auguste Rodin became the unresolved life work.
(Photo: 2021 Musée Rodin / ADAGP / Paris)
For Dante’s “Inferno” there is also the fact that the workforce of Hell is composed not least of good friends of the poet as well as of prominent and possibly admired figures from the past. Hell is actually the world. This intertwining explains the continued validity of the “Divine Comedy”, especially the first part and at least for Italy: What is represented is a social unity that goes back deep into the history of the nation. Dante, the wanderer through hell, purgatory and paradise, serves as a mediator under whose guidance Italian life, as it is, can be transferred into the spheres of a higher meaning. For the same reason, the exhibition is not strictly chronological: the paintings from the early modern period will soon be joined by works from the Baroque or 19th century.
The French art historian Jean Clair and his wife Laura Bossi, the curators, call their exhibition a “topography of evil”. They systematically designed the halls accordingly: The “Hell Throat” is followed by the descent into the deeper regions, then acquaintance with Dante and his leader Virgil, whereupon the changes of the devil are considered, and finally temptation and sin are considered.
In a second part of the exhibition, the infernal is searched for in the recent past: in the madhouse and prison, in war and in the Holocaust. According to the message, hell hides a state of the world to which the usual talk of a “crisis” is fundamentally inappropriate. Hell appears as the existence and expression of a fundamentally flawed world to which the curators behave less as historians than as leaders in the second instance. You take the “we” of which the Pope and Roberto Benigni spoke, immediately seriously. They double up Dante by curating him, and the success of the exhibition, including among young people, proves them right, at least with regard to the publicity of the “Inferno”.
At the end a starry sky unfolds
On the lower floor, in the actual “topography of evil”, the process works because of its systematics. On the upper floor, which deals with the motifs in which Hell is said to have taken shape in recent times, the exhibition falls apart, also in view of the many well-known works that are gathered there. There are also the annotated proofs from Primo Levi’s “Is that a person?” (1947), a book that explicitly replicates Dante’s “Inferno”. Certainly, the traditional props of Hell, the fire, the torn bodies, the many people in their torment are preserved in the works of the 20th century as well. But the tormentors are missing who made the “inferno” of the Middle Ages and early modern times an individual matter. And there is no motive for punishment. Instead, a universal doom is spread that leaves no doubt about its ideological character.
Anselm Kiefer’s “Sternenfall” from 1995.
(Photo: Anselm Kiefer)
Dante knew the doubt about himself. Shouldn’t the “Divine Comedy” be a complete work? Wasn’t it a kind of tower of Babel, though completed? And hadn’t Dante in the 13th song of “Purgatory” feared the punishment that might await him after death, because pride is a mortal sin? There is no mention of the “superbia” in the Roman “Inferno”. Rather, as in the last song of the poem, the exhibition closes with Dante’s return to the surface of the earth. He sees the stars, and with the help of Gerhard Richter (“Sternbild”, 1969), Anselm Kiefer (“Sternenfall”, 1995) and Thomas Ruff (“17 h 16m / – 45 °”, 1990) the night sky unfolds in everyone Splendor.
“Inferno”, Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome. Until January 9, 2022. The catalog is available in Italian and English and costs 50 euros.