Dhe illustrations for Dante’s “Divine Comedy” form a separate strand of art history. Only a few years after the poet’s death, the first illustrations of his work were made, and since then the list of artists who want to measure themselves against him has never stopped. William Blake, John Flaxman, Delacroix, Rodin and Robert Rauschenberg stand out among the multitude of Dante illustrators, and more recently the Italian Mannerist Federico Zuccari, whose commedia cycles have been featured at the Uffizi Gallery in an exhibition marking the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Nevertheless, when one thinks of scenes from “Inferno”, “Purgatorio” or “Paradiso”, one primarily sees Botticelli’s colored drawings and Gustave Doré’s engravings in front of one’s mind. One has captured the dramaturgical unity of Dante’s journey through hell, purgatory and paradise unsurpassed, the other her episodic inner conflict. For the “Divine Comedy” is both a Christian-doctrinal phantasmagoria and an earthly-supernatural panopticon; one can be seen in Botticelli, the other in Doré. His Dante visions are a film, while Botticelli’s are a Christian mystery play.
A wound as an awakening experience
Twenty-two years ago, the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett made the 84 Botticelli sheets, which it was able to acquire with the collection of the Scottish Duke of Hamilton, the subject of a memorable exhibition. What could not be seen at the time, namely the modern view of Dante, is now being presented at the Kulturforum in a more modestly dimensioned show that was delayed due to the corona pandemic. Botticelli as well as Flaxman, Delacroix, Böcklin, Lehmbruck and others only show a single leaf, Doré is represented with two engravings.
Instead, the focus is on two artists of the 20th century who are only known to experts today, the Danish artist Ebba Holm (1889 to 1967) and the German painter and graphic artist Klaus Wrage (1891 to 1984). For Wrage, who, like many members of his generation, had volunteered as a soldier in the First World War, the trenches and being wounded off Verdun became an awakening experience. In the prison camp he read Dante, which he began to illustrate after his return from France.
In 1921, at the suggestion of his patron Max Liebermann, Wrage exhibited his drawings for the “Divine Comedy” at the Academy of Arts on Pariser Platz. By 1925, he made a good 120 woodcuts, which he combined with the text pages into a self-published block book. During the Second World War, the illustrations that Wrage donated to the Kupferstichkabinett are lost, but the museum only finds out about this in 2020, when an art dealer operating in Spain offers the sheets by telephone. At the same time as the collection of the Wrage collection, the cabinet is acquiring more than a hundred linocuts that Ebba Holm made in the late 1920s based on the poet’s verses.
Despite the similarities in detail, the two series of images could not be more different. While Ebba Holm is still committed to the formal language of symbolism and art nouveau – which drives her to great pictorial inventions in works such as the “Forest of Suicides” – the seeds of expressionism sprout with Wrage. His Dante is a brother of the Men of Sorrows carved in wood by Barlach, Nolde and Heckel. Wrage translates the lovers Paolo and Francesca, who still appear in Lehmbruck as the embodiment of ancient beauty, into a double sculpture of embracing renunciation. He stacks the heads of the damned in the eternal ice of the river of hell to form a mountain of death over which the wanderers wander like sleepwalkers.
The modern inferno of globalization
With the ascent to paradise, which Ebba Holm freezes into seemingly conventional stage sets, Wrage’s portrayal increases to the psychedelic. The expressionistic pandemonium ends with fountains of light, dancing stars and spirals of rays. In the post-war period, Wrage placed the figure of Beatrice, whom Dante guided through the celestial spheres, at the center of a private mysticism of salvation, which he proclaimed in slide shows. Before that he had tried to win the favor of the Nazis with illustrations for the “Edda”, but they only employed him as a draftsman for military magazines. One would almost like to think of his late lecturing as a form of penance.
The curator Andreas Schalhorn contrasts the two classic-modern Dante admirers with a representative of contemporary art. Nothing more can be seen of the glow of hell and starlight, as the exhibition title promises, on Andreas Siekmann’s photorealistic computer images. Instead, you dive into the inferno of globalization: container and cruise ships, migrants in inflatable boats who are stopped by the coastal border guards of the EU agency Frontex, police officers, ambulances, monitors, barbed wire, the whole misery in hexagonal honeycomb images that combine to form a puzzle of the complement highly civilized horror.
Dante and Virgil float through this end-time landscape in the outlines given to them by Botticelli, the poet with the Phrygian cap, his guide with the long beard and royal hat. Siekmann called his cycle inspired by the Berlin exhibition of the year 2000 “The Exclusive”. For old-school Dante illustrators, he is a provocation. To everyone else, he proves that even after seven hundred years, the “Divine Comedy” still provides the stuff our nightmares are made of.
Hell and Starlight. Dante’s Divine Comedy in Modern and Contemporary. In the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin, until May 8th. The accompanying booklet costs 10 euros.
#Dante #illustrations #Berlin #walk #fountains #light