Many artists have illustrated Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy since it was penned at the beginning of the 14th century — but few people realize that Salvador Dalí was one of them.
Over on Open Culture, Dan Colman describes how the legendary Spanish surrealist was approached by the Italian government in the 1950s to produce a series of pieces to accompany Dante’s epic poem. When Dalí finally finished, he had produced a total of 100 stunning watercolor illustrations.
Hi-resolution copies of the images, not to mention print editions, are hard to come by — but you can browse all 100 of the illustrations here (albeit at varying levels of detail). Included below are a few selections from Inferno that we found particularly striking. (The top image is Illustration No. 21 from Inferno, and is titled Fraud.)
From Inferno, illustration No. 1: The Delightful Mount
From Inferno, Illustration No. 6: Cerberus
From Inferno, Illustration No. 13: Wood of Suicides
