Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy

A more artful set of interpretations can be found in Sandro Botticelli: The Drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy, an uncompleted set of 91 drawings commissioned a little over 500 years ago by Lorenzo de' Medici. Some, even with the superb, nearly full-page reproductions here, are a little hard to make out, so fragile is their vellum and faded their sepia inks. But others, in full-color or still in outline only, and scattered among the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, are breathtaking in their imaginative illuminations of Dante's lines. Essays by a slew of international scholars and commentary on each drawing, placing it within the poem and within the period's norms for illustration, round things out. Mar.