The purgatory drawings “involve a change in medium, abandoning the series’ pencilwork in favor of a pen and watercolor technique,” he adds. “The aesthetic shift makes sense. In Dante’s ...

The speaker is the Roman poet Virgil, Dante’s companion and guide, in scaling the lofty mountain of Purgatory in the second book of Dante’s tour-de-force account of the afterlife, The Divine ...

Dante elevated many of his contemporaries from historical obscurity to literary immortality just by casting them as minor characters in his verse. In Canto IV of Purgatorio, we encounter a ...

I thought of those scenes last spring when I began reading three new translations of Purgatory, being published to coincide with the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s death, at fifty-six ...

Dante Alighieri chose the latter. At first, I had difficulty appreciating the Purgatorio, written as it was as a narrative poem. Poetry seldom holds my interest; I find it difficult to understand.

What happens when you take the poetry out of Dante? If you replace the verse ... Chwast manages to sum up in his schematic diagram of purgatory as a multi-tiered cake? When it comes to ...

In “Inferno,” Dante and Virgil descend through the circles of horror until they reach the ice lake reserved for the traitors. In “Purgatorio” they climb through an opening in the ice ...