Inferno

This ten-metre print, made in eight parts, shows Dante and Virgil’s descent into Hell as described by Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy, 1321. The print shows an inverted mountainscape in negative, inscribed with text, marks, splashes and collaged elements. The source of the work are found images: a series of nineteenth century photographs of a mountainous panorama.

In Sandro Botticelli’s epic manuscript interpretation of Divine Comedy, Dante and Virgil are sequentially repeated like cyphers in the singular drawing bringing, to Dean’s mind, a sense of cinematic timing to the Map of Hell. Dean appropriated this idea by using circles to represent the figures: glossy and opaque for the living Dante and translucent for the shaded Virgil. Dean employed screenprinting for the circles and for the first time she also experimented with embedding collaged elements into the gravure process.

This vast print project relates to Dean’s stage and costume design for Inferno, part of The Dante Project, a commissioned ballet based on the Divine Comedy with music by Thomas Adès and choreography by Wayne McGregor.