L'INFERNO DI DANTE
This is one of the most graphic embodiments of tragic vision by any artist – Aristotelian "pity and terror" – a devastating visualization of Dante's words that is finally also (and must be) beyond words.
-Lloyd Schwartz, Pulitzer Prize winning critic and poet
The Inferno, the first and most familiar of three sections of The Divine Comedy, was completed early in the 14th century, by the poet Dante Alighieri while in exile from his beloved city of Florence. The poem, written in the vernacular Italian rather than Latin, expands the traditional troubadour love song/poem into a journey defining the human condition. Its exploration of sin and weakness retains its universality because we still recognize all of its elements in our own time and in ourselves. The Inferno is a poem of despair, sadness and loss culminating in the hope and ultimate redemption that Dante, the pilgrim, finds in the Purgatory and Paradiso, which complete the Divine Comedy. The long history of illustrations of this poem traditionally includes the figures of Dante and Virgil on their journey. Michael Mazur has chosen to show what they saw rather than their seeing of it.
In 1993, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published to great acclaim The Inferno of Dante, translated by Robert Pinsky a illustrated with reproductions of monotypes by Michael Mazur. Now in this suite of forty-one etchings, Mazur makes the Inferno images available as original prints. His version extends and deepens the record of his lifelong reading of Dante's poem. Each image faces the relevant excerpted portion of Dante's poem in Italian with Pinsky's English translation. Presented in two beautifully designed formats, one format contains two bound volumes, the other is portfolio bound, with loose pages. This is a communion of three masters: the Italian poet, his premier modern translator, and a contemporary master in the art of printmaking. This website contains a complete set of the images and the texts that they relate to, in Italian and in English.
For further information contact Mary Ryan Gallery www.MaryRyanGallery.com
24 West 57th Street NY, NY 10019 212.397.0669
copyright © Michael Mazur and Farrar Straus and Giroux
