Dante’s Inferno and its socio-political relevance, 700 years later

[image: one of the paintings featured in the exhibit Inferno, photo by the Author]

Dante Alighieri’s Comedy is one of the masterpieces of human civilization. He started working on it in 1308 and completed it in 1320, shortly before he died. This year being the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, several commemorative events have taken place throughout the world and especially in Italy. A few days ago my wife and I visited an exhibit entitled “Inferno,” held at the beautiful space offered by the Scuderie del Quirinale museum in Rome. It was a spectacular experience, and one that made us reflect in rather unexpected ways, especially once we reached the last part of the show.

As one might imagine, most of “Inferno” is dedicated to the first third of Dante’s Comedy, by far the most interesting one in my mind. Purgatory is okay and Paradise is rather boring, because of course the most interesting characters and stories are those of transgression and rebellion. “Heaven for the climate, and Hell for the company,” as Mark Twain repeated, quoting one Ben Wade from the late 1800’s.

The first piece we saw upon entering the show was a spectacular sculpture of countless bodies of fallen angels tumbling on each other. Sculpted from a single piece of marble! Other stunning pieces soon followed. A replica of the gigantic doors of Hell by Rodin (now at the homonymous museum in Paris); paintings of both Dante and of famous scenes from the Inferno made by artists across the centuries, from Botticelli to Bosch; multiple disturbing representations of Satan. And so on.

We immersed ourselves in the details of the immense poetic canvas threaded by Dante, with its intricate references not just to the Christian religion, but — more fundamentally — to human nature and society. After all, Dante was a political exile from Florence at the time, and he found himself at liberty of placing some of his enemies in Hell, including a few Popes, such as Celestine V (for his alleged cowardice when he decided to abdicate) and of course Boniface VIII (whose actions indirectly led to Dante’s expulsion from Florence).

Famously, the Comedy is also a journey of spiritual self-discovery, as made clear by the opening verses:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

(Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straight-forward pathway had been lost.)

Dante is accompanied in the journey first by the Roman poet Virgil, and then by his long-lost love, Beatrice. While of course all three parts of the poem — Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso — are instrumental in Dante’s grasping of the larger truths of existence, it is Inferno that offers the most dramatic and even shocking episodes.

Which is why it was both unexpected and fascinating to emerge into the next to the last room of the exhibit, where suddenly the topic was no longer Dante’s work but rather contemporary, real life versions of Hell on Earth, especially the effects of the Industrial Revolution and the wars that marked the 19th and 20th centuries.

The curators of the exhibit wanted to remind us that Dante’s imagination was always meant to reflect earthly realities, both in terms of individual human psychologies and of social and political phenomena. What better way to make that point, then, that to remind the visitor that we have been the authors of an astounding number of actual incarnations of Hell, springing not from imaginary divine punishment of human sins, but from the reality of human greed and violence?

The first half of the paintings and drawings in that section of the Inferno exhibit displayed the stark realities of exploitation of the Industrial Revolution. It is the development in human history that gave us both unprecedented prosperity and ways to subject fellow human beings to new sufferings. Some of the images clearly highlighted the similarities between renditions of Dante’s fictional Inferno and the all too real ones built by the robber barons of the 19th century, the predecessors of the current crop of billionaire exploiters that includes Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the like.

But as bad as exploitation for greed is, it pales in comparison with the horrors of war, and especially of the two World Wars that were depicted in the works exhibited in the second half of the same room of Inferno. I was particularly struck by a black and white drawing, in caricature style, by the German artist Max Beckmann (1884–1950), entitled “The Last Ones.” It depicted angry, wounded, distorted people who kept fighting their enemies even though it was clear that there wasn’t any point to continue the struggle. The piece encapsulates the madness and futility of war in a way that I’ve rarely found so effective.

Not far from the Beckmann drawing was arguably the most disturbing piece in the entire exhibit (which was made of a good number of disturbing pieces). It was a case containing four masks with casts of the faces of soldiers suffering from gas poisoning during World War I. An incredibly vivid reminder of the depth of human stupidity and cruelty.

Finally, just before getting into the very last room of Inferno, I saw a small tridimensional sculpture of two mounds which, at closer inspection, turned out to be made of small human corpses. The label said: “Nein! Eleven.” It took me a moment to get it.

But it was not all gloom and doom. Entry to the last room was greeted by the verse that ends Dante’s Inferno:

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

(Thence we came forth to re-behold the stars.)

Sure enough, the last space presented the viewer with a number of photographs of star fields taken by various telescopes. It was a rather optimistic ending to a superb but unsettling itinerary through the depths of Dante’s world and art.

The question, of course, is whether we as a global society will be able to find the stars again, or whether the horrors of the last century and a half were only the prelude to the real Inferno to come. Only time will tell, and it increasingly looks like we won’t have too long to wait before finding out.