page_title: Divine Comedy
section_title: In the arts
hierarchical_section_title: Divine Comedy / In the arts
context_page_description: The Divine Comedy is a long Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed in 1320, a year before his death in 1321. It is widely considered to be the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.
  The narrative takes as its literal subject the state of souls after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward, and describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise or Heaven, while allegorically the poem represents the soul's journey towards God, beginning with the recognition and rejection of sin, followed by the penitent Christian life, which is then followed by the soul's ascent to God. Dante draws on medieval Roman Catholic theology and philosophy, especially Thomistic philosophy derived from the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas.
context_section_description: The Divine Comedy has been a source of inspiration for countless artists for almost seven centuries. There are many references to Dante's work in literature. In music, Franz Liszt was one of many composers to write works based on the Divine Comedy. In sculpture, the work of Auguste Rodin includes themes from Dante, and many visual artists have illustrated Dante's work, as shown by the examples above. There have also been many references to the Divine Comedy in cinema, television, digital arts, comics and video games.
caption: Dante and Virgil in Hell, painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1850)
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "2806", "Image ImageLength": "3517", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "2413/25", "Image YResolution": "2413/25", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS6 (Macintosh)", "Image DateTime": "2014:10:02 07:12:10", "Image ExifOffset": "232", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "414", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5898", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2014:07:11 19:50:42", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2803", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3515"}