"Divine Comedy": when hell freezes over

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Only in the reflection of darkly burning flames can you see the tormented figures, tortured by bizarre-looking creatures in all kinds of demonic ways. Dante Alighieri, Italy’s national poet, employs imagery of fire, heat, and death to evoke his Inferno. The Hell he portrays in the Divine Comedy – a fantastical, sadistic nightmare from the Middle Ages – has inspired many painters.

And yet the pictures, like those painted in oil on wood by Renaissance artist Hieronymus Bosch, show just one aspect of Dante’s Hell: “The Hell depicted by Dante as an abyss reaching down to the center of the Earth is not equally hot everywhere, but actually ice-cold in large parts,” points out Professor Florian Mehltretter, Director of the Institute of Italian Philology at LMU. This applies most of all to the lowest, the ninth circle of Hell, where the betrayers of God and fatherland suffer their torments. Here the sinners are trapped in ice, their bodies caught in absurd contortions: “Già era, e con paura il metto in metro, là dove l'ombre tutte eran coperte e trasparien come festuca in vetro.” Or as the English translation by Robert and Jean Hollander has it: “Now, and I shudder as I write it out in verse, I was where the shades were wholly covered, showing through like bits of straw in glass.”

Click here for the article in the digital research magazine

"Divine Comedy" - when hell freezes over: Read the article in the digital research magazine here