Gustave Dore's Dante Illustrations

This illustration, by Gustave Dore, depicts Satan imprisoned in the ice, in the centre of Hell, in Dante's Inferno. This illustration was not published, perhaps most obviously because Satan appears to be sitting cross-legged. Dante specifies that Satan's legs are sticking out of the other side of the hole he is 'plugging' at the centre of the earth.

The illustration by Dore that was published is more faithful to Dante's text, with Satan only visible from the waist up. A more chilling atmosphere (no pun intended) is created by the heavy use of shadow, with Satan receding into the darkness, and Dante and Virgil highlighted against it.

Dore's Inferno illustrations are his third most popular illustrations, released in more than 200 different editions. In first and second place are his Bible illustrations (700+ editions) and Don Quixote (300+). It is said that Jack Nicholson, in preparing for his role as the devil in The Witches of Eastwick, pored over Dore's Inferno illustrations in order to get into character. There was also a copy in the Disney library during the studio's golden age, and the influence can be seen in the mise en scene of certain sequences in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio and Fantasia.

An updated version of the Divine Comedy was released with text by Sandro Birk and Marcus Sanders and illustrations by Sandro Birk. The illustrations are direct responses to the Dore illustrations; the rocky, infernal world of hell is re-imagined as an urban landscape reminiscent of modern-day Los Angeles.

Birk's illustrations of Heaven in Paradiso are even more interesting, controversially alluding to Hinduism and Islam in the holiest of Heaven's denizens. My only complaint is that Birk's illustrations are drawings rather than etchings, not allowing for an emulation of Dore's style, which I feel would have reinforced the point a bit more. Nevertheless, I would definitely reccomend Birk and Sanders' Divine Comedy to any fan of Dante or Dore.

Beasts and monsters: Kley

I recently went to the exhibition 'Against Nature' at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. The focus of the exhibition is sculpture as a medium for the depiction of metamorphoses and transformations - many of them merging animals and humans in a manner evoking classical sculpture. Read about the exhibition here.

However, the first artist I thought of when at the exhibition was Heinrich Kley, who is known mostly through his influence on animation. Kley's most famous subjects were legendary creatures such as centaurs, trolls and demons - his sketches were the direct inspiration for many of the sequences we see in Fantasia. Reflecting the advent of the factory age in which they were drawn, Kley's sketches also refer to smoke belching factories and industrial subjects. I've posted a selection of my favorite Kley drawings below; those with captions have them below the image. Apologies for some of the shadows in these scans.

And why shouldn't I play the guitar?

Sure I play the guitar, now all the more!

Away from Rome!

What a devilish stench!

Sabotage

This leads me on rather neatly to Albert Hurter, a Disney 'inspirational sketch artist' who was profoundly influenced by Kley. Hurter was payed to sketch all day; his drawings were used as the inspiration for Disney's animators. His subjects included animals and anthropomorphism; most interesting to me, though, are his drawings of inanimate objects given life and personality.

Fans of Hurter may be interested in John Canemaker's Before the Animation Begins, which provides a detailed account of the lives of inspirational sketch artists to work at the Disney studio, along with a selection of the work they produced while there. Another book on Hurter is He Drew As He Pleased, a book consisting almost entirely of sketches made by Hurter at the Disney studio. It's a wonderful book, but, printed in the 1940s, is now rather expensive; for samples of He Drew As He Pleased visit Brad Goodchild's blog.

To finish off, here are the Chats Fourres, or Law-Cats, from Francis Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel. The Law-Cats are cat-like creatures that symbolise judges and lawyers, and 'live on corruption'. Below are depictions by Gustave Dore (the first four images) and W. Heath Robinson (the fifth and sixth images).