The Doré Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy: 136 Plates

Excellent printout and price. Just get it!

I have a horrible confession to make: I much prefer to look at Gustave Dore's fantastic and grotesque scenes depicting Dante's "Divine Comedy" with just appropriate lines from the Longfellow translation then have to deal with all those tercets. Even worse, I think these 135 illustrations from the 1861 edition comprise Dore's best body of work, even better than his famous Bible illustrations completed five years later, mainly because I think Dore's style is better suited to the depths of Hell and the realms of Purgatory, rather than the stories of the Bible. Clearly Dore found his kindred soul mate in Dante and even though he did classic engravings to illustrate everything from "Don Quixote" to "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," this is his monumental achievement. Many admirers like the plates depicting the souls writhing in the fiery torments of Hell, but my favorite has to do with the lower level of hell where Dante and Virgil encounter the souls frozen in ice (Canto XXXII). This Dover edition is relatively inexpensive, which means the paper quality is geared towards economy rather than reproduction, but I think that it a satisfactory tradeoff, all things considered.

Absolutely perfect! These pictures capture the essence and feel of the Divine Comedy perfectly. These are the kinds of scenes that went through my mind while I read. What captured my attention the most were the plates of Puragatory. Nobody else could have caught the mood more accurately. Dore and Dante are both gensises.