Wednesday 29 April, 6.30pm at Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery, 2a Conway Street, Fitzrovia, London W1T 6BA
Dante in Purgatorio: Private view and lecture by Professor Alessandro Scafi
ICI London hosts a special private view of the exhibition Dante in Purgatorio, open at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery until 2 May, with a lecture by renowned Dantist Professor Alessandro Scafi, exclusively for our Members and Friends
Dante in Purgatorio: works by Emma Haworth, Sylvain Lefebvre, Hepzibah Swinford, Hans Frans, Alex Rooney, Maxime Simon, Alasdair Wallace
Completed in 1320, La Commedia by Dante Alighieri is the most detailed foundation piece of literature to explain life after death. His epic poem is immensely descriptive, and the attentive reader can paint a picture in their minds of the strange landscapes that our protagonist observes. The worlds that he conjured have inspired some of the most celebrated artists of the Western tradition. Sandro Botticelli, Eugène Delacroix, William Blake, and Salvador Dalí are a few of many who have illustrated his poem. The Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery is delighted to show the work of seven artists who continue this tradition into the 21st century.
This show is dedicated to the second of the three parts that make up Dante’s La Commedia, Purgatorio (Purgatory). Having visited the land of the damned in Inferno, Dante’s Purgatorio is a world filled with the souls that purify themselves as they ascend a mountain to heaven. Artists in this exhibition depict the landscape that they traverse, the obstacles they must overcome, and Dante’s place amongst them as a breathing form with a shadow in the land of ghosts.
Each artist has found a distinctive approach to address this theme across a great range of mediums, including traditional fresco painting, linocut, wood engraving, and oil on canvas. Some have reimagined Dante’s world in ways that feel incredibly contemporary, whilst other refer closely to the history of artistic responses to the epic poem. In some cases, artists have seen in the trials of purgatory a symbol for the challenge of the artist, who must purify their soul to achieve their best and most authentic work. Only then can they be invited to the land of Paradiso.
Book your place HERE
Alessandro Scafi is Senior Lecturer on Medieval and Renaissance Cultural history at the Warburg Institute, SAS, University of London. He is the author of Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth and Maps of Paradise (London and Chicago, 2006 and 2013). He has published on various aspects of the history of cartography, pilgrimage, Aby Warburg, and on Italian art and literature, in particular on Dante and Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini. His L’uomo con le radici in cielo (Milan: SEM, 2022; Feltrinelli, 2024) is a meditation on life and death, on God and man, on the balance between freedom, vocation and fate.