Books like Dante's the Divine Comedy — picked by fans

Blake was the unwitting father of many things—among them, illustration as we have come to know it.

He was (metaphorically speaking) a sport (botanically speaking) an unprecedented visionary in both word and image. For the best of his illustrations, or "illuminations" as he called them, you might want to look at The Book of Job and ask yourself where the authority of these images and imagery comes from.

As far as his texts go, my favorite is probably The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, mostly because of a section called “Proverbs from Hell.” (He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.) Never before or since have wisdom and subversion sung together in such harmony.  

Compared to the other recommendations here, this one is a bit of a cheat, being a collection. But it does well to cover a whole swath of artists from what’s come to be called the "Golden Age" of illustration: Parrish, Dulac, Rackham, J.W. Smith, Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, and more.

What is it that distinguishes them as a "school"? The material, first–vivid, classic tales of action and adventure. But there are certain shared aesthetic values as well. Colors that glow in juxtaposition, and (again) an open embrace of the line as a way of pronouncing and demarcating edges. False, but also clarifying. A little like the piano. Or any word you choose. 

This is not a book. It’s the 8th installment of a magazine series on illustrators, a labor of love put together by David Saunders.

This edition features the work of one Hugh J. Ward, a student of Wyeth’s who, for having come a generation late, missed out on all the Ivanhos and Robin Hoods and Arabian Nights. He therefore had to ply his craft painting hilariously problematical pulp fiction covers, featuring hooligans, turbaned Arabs, apes, and almost always women in torn clothing.

Do these images populate our dreams? I hope not, and I’m not sure whether my fascination with Ward’s work is a measure of my sympathy, my admiration, or my moral delinquency, but the man could flat-out paint. If you ever wondered, "What if Albert Zorn had had to hustle for a living?", here’s your answer. 

And then there are the illustrators who were finally allowed to generate their own material.

Jean Giraud was the visionary behind the famously unfinished Jodorowsky Dune movie, but also Blade Runner, Alien, Tron, and The Fifth Element. All these and more were based upon drawings and comics by Giraud.

Whether he has inscribed our minds or read them, it’s clear to anyone who glances in the direction of his later work—especially those titles credited to "Moebius"—he lived rent-free in some corner of the collective imagination.

He is also said to be one of those artists who drew without apparent hesitation or forethought. That is, in practice, he appeared to be more of a transmitter than a creator. As with all the best.

First I want to say how much I love The Divine Comedy Dante’s Inferno and this graphic novel adaptation by Seymour Chwast is a wonderful version of the tale. If you don’t already know the story I highly suggest you read it in its original text but also be sure to grab this copy as it will really bring the levels of hell to a more comical light. I particularly love the black and white bold art style and humor brought to life here. 

Just as Dante needed good guides on his epic journey through the afterlife, so contemporary readers typically need reliable companions on their own journeys into Dante’s poem. The best thing, I find, is to read Dante with, and alongside, his commentators. An ideal way to do this is through the invaluable online Dartmouth Dante Project and Dante Lab, which provide the entire texts of more than 75 of these commentaries in a customisable digital workspace. But if you want a book to hand, The Cambridge Companion to Dante’s ‘Commedia’ provides a really helpful overview of Dante’s masterpiece and its core narrative, linguistic, cultural, and doctrinal features, as well as useful introductions to the poem’s composition and reception. 

Some of the most original scholarship on Dante in the past fifty or so years has been historical and contextual. This research enables us to understand Dante’s texts more fully in their own immediate contexts, of course, but it also reflects the fact that many readers of Dante become increasingly interested in the wider contexts – ethical, political, philosophical, theological, economic, literary, cultural, etc. – that Dante’s own poetic masterpiece opens up. In thirty chapters, the collaborative volume Dante in Context exemplifies the best of this historical and contextual work, and provides an invaluable introduction to the world of Dante.   

This book was a revelation to me in first studying Dante. Here was an author taking Dante’s questions, and his answers to those questions, seriously. A brilliant Cambridge Italianist and a Dominican priest, Kenelm Foster is passionately engaged with the theology of Dante.

In this book, he provides his celebrated account of the ‘Two Dantes,’ one overly committed to paganism, the other devoted to Christianity. He also develops his comparison between Aquinas’s theory of implicit faith (according to which pagans may be saved) and Dante’s strange invention of a section of limbo in which virtuous pagans are, it seems, eternally damned. Although I do not hold now to all of Foster’s provocative assumptions or conclusions, I still find his mode of questioning Dante, and reading Dante historically and theologically, inspirational and exhilarating.  

This really engaging book shows how Capital, Volume 1 is implicitly modelled on Dante’s Inferno, from the way Marx stages the descent (katabasis) into the hell of the 19th-century factory to the division of the French and English translations into 33 chapters, mirroring the 33 cantos of Dante’s famous poem. Roberts almost makes you forget you’re reading political theory, an effect Marx was aiming for in trying to reach his socialist and working-class audiences.

After writing La Bella Lingua, I thought I had learned many of Florence’s hidden stories. Botticelli’s Secret proved me wrong. Although we‘ve never met, I think of Joseph Luzzi as a kindred soul who shares my passion for Italy's language, art, and literature. With a scholar’s depth and a writer’s deft touch, he re-creates the brilliance and complexity of the Renaissance and traces its impact through the centuries since. At the same time, Luzzi draws us into a layered mystery that crosses centuries and unfolds in ever richer, deeper dimensions. 

If you haven’t visited Florence, you’ll want to explore Botticelli’s and Dante’s hometown. If you have, you’ll want to return to deepen your appreciation of the city where artists and writers re-invented Western civilization.