Oddly, the site where the Dore illustrations were obtained seems to be offline. Click to enlarge.

Just before the pilgrim has his second dream, he offers a time indication via a reference to geomancy - the ancient art of using figures to...

One of the more unusual pairings of Biblical and Classical exemplars comes in Canto 18, where we first are reminded of how Mary, after learn...

This is Gustave Dore's version of the encounter with Marco Lombardo in Canto 16. Numerous scenes from the Commedia as reimagined by Do...

Louis Ginzberg , a 20th century Talmudic scholar, gathered many traditional Jewish folktales and legends into a four-volume series of narrat...

For the question of the War in Heaven, the fall of Satan and his later career, Jutta suggests this article from the Catholic Encyclopedia , ...

It seems that Cantos 14 through 20 contain another architectonic pattern that remained unnoticed for centuries, until Charles Singleton poin...

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed tutelage. Tutelage is the inability to use one's own understanding without an...

Giotto: Wrath Dante interlaces several heterogeneous elements in this canto, not all of them in any obvious way linked to wrath. To name onl...

Three times in canto 15, Dante loses his power of sight: with the angel, during the "visione estatica," and in the thick envelopin...

Alain Badiou, a contemporary French thinker, offers this comment about how the concept of "evil" is handled in politics and media ...