Previous Exhibitions - Dante Rediscovered: from Blake to Rodin

Dante Rediscovered: from Blake to Rodin

15th August 2007 - 18th November 2007

The rediscovery of Dante in the Romantic period and its lasting impact on British literature and art are explored in The Wordsworth Museum and Art Gallery's sepcial exhibition: Dante Rediscovered: From Blake To Rodin.

Works by Blake, Fuseli, Flaxman, Rossetti, Goya and Rodin are exhibited alongside manuscripts and rare books relating to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats and Shelley, and early manuscripts and printed editions of Dante's masterpiece, The Divine Comedy.

The exhibition begins by introducing the changing appearance of Dante in art from his own time until the present day, and illustrates the extent to which the Divine Comedy was known in England prior to the Romantics, from its first appearance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, to the popularity in the eighteenth century of two episodes from the Inferno: Ugolino, and Paolo and Francesca.

The heart of the exhibition features the rediscovery of Dante by Romantic artists and poets. This was a dramatic, far-reaching and long-lasting episode in the history of British literature and art. Before that Dante's work was little known, for the simple reason that the Divine Comedy was not fully and accurately translated into English until 1814. The translation, by Henry Cary, introduced Dante to English readers, writers and artists, and this exhibition will focus on those Romantic poets and artists who were inspired by their readings of Dante, and explore in depth particular themes derived from those readings.

The exhibition continues the story into the late nineteenth century. The Romantics were largely fascinated by the Inferno, but Pre-Raphaelite writers and artists, under the leadership of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, developed a more humanistic vision of Dante, focussing on his early poem, the Vita Nuova, and the idealized figure of Beatrice. The Inferno, however, remained an important source of images of the horrors of modern war in Goya's Desastros de la Guerra and of the alienation of modern life in Rodin's drawings and sculptures connected with The Gates of Hell.

Lenders to the exhibition include the British Museum, the British Library, John Rylands University Library, The Tate Gallery, the V&A, The Ashmolean, The Fitzwilliam Museum, the Bodleian Library and Trinity College Cambridge.

Buy the accompanying catalogue: This acclaimed book looks in detail at the British discovery of Italy's finest poet, and explores how the leading writers and artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century responded to his work.

Fully illustrated throughout in colour, and produced to our exacting standards, this book also features essays by David Bindman, Stephen Hebron and Michael O'Neill. For further information, click here.

Read the press release: Dante Rediscovered: From Blake To Rodin.