Even the least religious among us talk about the circles of hell at least occasionally. When we do so, we may or may not be thinking about where that concept came from. Divina Commediaor Divine Comedy. We each imagine that circle in our own way. Usually we fill that circle with sinners and punishments inspired by our own disgust. However, some of Dante’s early readers imagined the circle with an earnestness and precision that may seem extreme now. “The first astronaut in Dante’s world was the Florentine polymath Antonio Manetti.” Hunter Dukes of Public Domain Review writes:He “concluded that hell was 3,246 miles wide and 408 miles deep.” The young Galileo suggested that “the vaulted ceiling of the Inferno was sustained by the same physical principles as Brunelleschi’s dome.”
In 1855, an aristocratic sculptor, politician, and Dante scholar Michelangelo Caetani His own accurate artistic renderings of not only the Inferno but also Purgatorio and Paradiso. VI Tavore’s Dante Alighieri Di Chiarata’s Sacred Materialsor Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy on six plates.
“The first plate outlines Dante’s cosmology, from the lowest sphere of hell, through the nine celestial spheres, to the highest level of paradise, the Empyrean, the abode of the gods,” Dukes said. I’m writing. “Inferno is visualized in a cutaway style,” and its circles are drawn “like geological formations.” Arranged in tiers like a wedding cake, “Purgatory is depicted at eye level from the perspective of the lucky souls who navigate these islands and mountains.”
In Paradise, “Hell and Purgatory are now small moments on the page, stranded worlds surrounded by Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and the other celestial spheres.” At the top, “Hell and Purgatory are now small moments on the page, worlds left behind, surrounded by Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and the other celestial spheres.” There is the Candida Rosa, an amphitheater structure where Dante leaves behind Beatrice, his true love and guide, and comes face to face with God and the Trinity. These and other illustrations can be found at: Public domain reviews or Cornell University Library Digital CollectionsIt comes from the “second edition of this work produced by Caetani using the then novel technique of chromolithography” in 1872, and “produced in a somewhat smaller format by the monks of Monte Cassino.” He adds. If you can believe in your work, you can be believed.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages and cultures. His projects include the Substack newsletter books about cities and a book Stateless City: A Stroll Through Los Angeles in the 21st Century. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
