Inferno XVIII: Fecal Matter

Inferno XVIII: Fecal Matter

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

Dante has arrived in the eighth circle of Inferno, in the first of ten pouches (ditches) called the malebolge (translated as “evil pouches”). Here he witnesses a band of panderers (pimps, flatterers, et al), tormented by demons as they move in procession along the floor of the valley His gaze is arrested by the sight of one pathetic sinner whom he recognizes, covered with a thick layer of excrement.

*    *    *

Dante’s cruel sarcasm is on full display in his exchange with Alessio Interminei of Lucca, a flatterer who asks Dante why he feels compelled to stare him down more than the others. The retort is mean-spirited and antagonistic:

"Why, if I remember,

I saw you once before with dry hair.

You are Alessio Interminei of Lucca,

so I study you more than all the others.”

Dante’s towering literary reputation sometimes overshadows his arrogance and cruelty. He can be a tool, but he’s still funny as shit.

This is a shitty drawing in more ways than one. I’m pleased enough with the bottom half, but the top surrenders itself to whimsy, my eternal predilection. Not that whimsy can't be terrifying. Just ask the two foolish children who, lured by promises of treacle tarts by the androgynous, superficially mirthful Child Catcher, met sudden, horrifying entrapment in Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang. The bottom of my drawing is certainly whimsical, but there is to me more perversity in the characterizations and the way lines, visual hierarchy, and other formal/design decisions contribute to a sense of severe agony in its figures. I need to do something about the demons—they’re a bit more like characters from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show than the fierce antagonists they’re meant to be. Maybe I’ll simply obfuscate them in an inky cloud. Things are scarier when you can’t quite see them.

I need to study how imagery evolves this way for me, how some parts go wrong while other parts seem to fall in place almost effortlessly (although I should be careful to say that nothing ever feels effortless); how sketches sometimes seem more essential and honest than finished drawings or, conversely, how finished drawings finesse the seeds of simple ideas into more sophisticated form. I had a wonderful student once, Matt Leines, who had undertaken an independent study project with me. We met every week to discuss his ideas, and I recall at one point he came to me with an expression of frustration. He had a sketch—small and in a notebook—and he had a finished illustration—a bit larger. His question was simple: “why doesn’t this look like that?” In other words, what was it about the sketch that he had been unable to apprehend in the finished image? We went round and round and—apart from the typical technical explanations (eg.: perhaps his use of mediums didn’t translate well at larger scale and on a different substrate?) I think we ultimately decided that sometimes the honest impulse for mark-making, the exploration of form and meaning in its most naive, open and meandering mode of drawing and painting, is impossible to replicate.

So, some things turn to shit.

Inferno XIV: The Old Man of Crete

Inferno XIV: The Old Man of Crete

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

A fantastic interlude occurs in the fourteenth canto of L’Inferno as Virgil revives imagery from Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream, an image of a giant statue made from various materials, from precious and strong on the top to crumbling clay at the bottom.

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After leaving the Forest of Suicides Dante and Virgil traverse the burning sands of the the seventh circle of hell. Their conversation is set aside for a time as Virgil relates the allegory of the Old Man of Crete, an image borrowed from the second chapter of the Book of Daniel, in which the great King Nebudchadnezzar is visited by a dream of a giant statue, metaphorically composed of various materials—strong to weak, precious to worthless. In Virgil’s description the statue is an enormous colossus, emerging from the side of Mount Ida in Crete. 

The statue’s back faces Egypt, heretofore the world’s dominant society, and looks to Rome in deference to Christian rule. As a symbol of humanity’s crumbling moral and political fortitude it has a head of gold, arms and breast made of silver, bronze abdomen and thighs, and iron legs. His right foot, upon which he rests most of his weight, is made of crumbling, kiln baked clay, a symbol of the deteriorating institution of the medieval Catholic Church. He cries tears (through cracks in his body, not as I have depicted it in the illustration) which on the ground below create the four rivers of Inferno: Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon and Cocytus. 

This is my favorite drawing so far, in part because of the sheer complexity of the image I needed to make. I relied a bit on ancient conceptions of Nebudchadnezzar is developing the costume and styling of hair and beard (see below), and really enjoyed interpreting the various active aspects of the image, finding concise and iconic ways to indicate is gaze, the tears, the geography, and materiality.

Inferno XIII: The Forest of Suicides

Inferno XIII: The Forest of Suicides

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

In the second ring of the seventh circle of hell, Virgil encourages Dante to pluck a twig from a thorn tree. Our hero is shocked to discover that the tree is an unnamed suicide, whose plaintive cries and oozing black blood reveal the collective fate of the entire forest.

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As Dante and Virgil enter the second of three rings in the Circle of the Violent, they encounter the fate of those who do violence to themselves. Disembodied moans surround them and Virgil tells Dante that if he were to pluck a twig from one of the mangled trees, he might learn the story.

Dante does so, and—weeping with despair and oozing black blood—the tree ultimately unravels his story. He walked the earth as Pier della Vigna, counselor to the Emperor Frederick II. Vigna’s fated suicide was in a strange way the result of his fierce dedication and love for Frederick. His contemporaries grew envious of their close relationship and they circulated ugly rumors, causing him great shame, despair and—ultimately—death by his own hand.

In search of a different language for this drawing, I’ve developed something more of a design. 

Inferno XII: The Minotaur

Inferno XII: The Minotaur

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

In Canto XII, Dante and Virgil descend a steep slope and encounter at the bottom the mythic Minotaur, a beast with the head of a bull and body of a man. They are in the first ring of the Circle of the Violent, that which holds those who have committed violence against others.

*    *    *

The carnal essence of the Minotaur has alternately thrilled and terrified me since my earliest years. If there's an embodiment of the anxiety I experienced in a sexually repressed childhood (and much of adulthood) it would be this creature, with the physique of a dangerously muscled, hyper-masculine man, topped off with a smoky black bull's head, its dark features obscured by shadows and fur. The half-man/half-beast trope permeated my already anxious brain in many incarnations—including that of a lizard-man known as a Gorn, battling Captain Kirk on Star Trek. It was also fodder for a shitload of bad dreams. In retrospect, it's ridiculous that I would have been afraid of a guy in a plastic reptile suit, gingerly tossing fake punches at William Shatner, but it really did terrify me as a five year-old. 

A little history: I grew up with crippling self-consciousness about my body. I thought that my morbid shyness about it was in some way an index to inferior masculinity, and it remained with me until I first had sex in college. I dreaded going to the beach, turned down many a pool party invitation.  It's dissipated over the years and these days I'm pretty relaxed about my body (although there's certainly a ridiculously flawed logic to feeling less self-conscious about the body I have at 54). 

It started with my budding awareness of myself as a sexual being, I think, and that must have been at about age seven or eight. Growing up in a working class neighborhood in the South, I was at all times surrounded by boys who ran shirtless, dirty and unashamed of their bodies, and I both admired and feared their masculinity. Our equality (or perhaps my sense of intellectual superiority—I had what most of them didn't have, or at least I thought I did) existed only above the shoulders. No qualms about showing my head—it was a nice head, not bad looking, and it had nothing to do with sexuality. Funny things came out of my mouth from time-to-time, and I liked to show off with my face. The anxiety reached its peak in middle and high school years, when the same boys began to regard themselves as post-pubescent studs, exacerbating my insecurities.

But when you put a fecund, ferocious animal's head on an already sexualized, brutal body—primed to do violence against sensitive men—you eradicate intellect. Its mind has been supplanted with thoughtless force, and that's pretty scary.

When I began this drawing, I was reminded of the many depictions I had seen over the years, all of which used the body of the Minotaur to echo beastly savagery, a fitting partner to the bull's head. But, from the start, my impulse was to allow the body to be gently erotic, youthful and delicately drawn with lines that virtually disappear into the page. A grateful nod to Aubrey Beardsley, absolutely, but I hope it's more than imitation of a stylistic convention. I suppose it could have been driven by a latent enjoyment of male nudity, or maybe it's a taming of the beast that scared me so much as a boy. Not sure.

Inferno XI: The Circle of the Violent

Inferno XI: The Circle of the Violent

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

Canto XI is one of the more pedantic parts of L'Inferno. Dante and Virgil descend to the seventh circle, housing those who have committed violent acts in life. It is subdivided into three smaller rings to accommodate sinners who are guilty of various classifications of violence.

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The violent are punished in a variety of ways, depending on the transgressions they committed on earth. The seventh circle is sub-divided into three rings, each of which metes out a unique punishment. In the first ring, flooded by a river of blood, those who have committed violence against God and nature languish eternally. These are the plunderers, murderers and thieves who once corrupted the earth. The second ring is reserved for those who committed violence against themselves. Ingeniously, Dante conceives of a forest of suicides, wherein sinners have been transmogrified into talking, thorny threes, oozing blood. The third ring is for those who have perpetrated violence against their neighbors, including blasphemers and usurers, who suffer eternally in a desert of burning sands. Virgil explains that fraud is the greatest of sins in this circle, because it is the transgression most unique to mankind.

The eleventh canto is unique in its instructive tone, with a large portion devoted to Virgil's explanation of how the circle is subdivided, classified and populated. I had a couple of goals in mind in structuring this picture: depiction of dialogue as key to its substance (the face-to-face, plain as day positioning of the two heroes), and a didactic representation of the three rings concentrically arranged—the river of blood, the suicide trees and the burning sands. I liken it to a conversation between teacher and pupil, poised before a diagram.

Inferno IX: The Furies at the Gates of Dis

Inferno IX: The Furies at the Gates of Dis

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

Arriving at the gates of the city of Dis, Dante and Virgil are accosted by three furies, minions of Medusa. 

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Dante and Virgil meet some formidable foes in the furies, Greek figures of vengeance with bat wings and snakes for hair, who carried instruments of torture and punishment: a whip, a chalice of poison and a torch. They hover at the gates of Dis, a walled city whose architecture included mosques (presumably inspired by Jerusalem of the 14th century). Because Islam was a relatively new religion—considered heresy in the eyes of the Church and was certainly not Christianity—its monuments were fitting features of a city whose primary descriptive elements contradict conceptions of Paradiso.

Inferno VIII: "Seize Filippo Argenti!"

Inferno VIII: "Seize Filippo Argenti!"

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

Dante encounters the Florentine politician Filippo Argenti, and the wrathful cease their violent battle to consolidate their attacks on him. Argenti then begins to tear at himself in due course, making quite a bloody scene.

*    *    *

The wrathful turn on Filippo Argenti, but he literally beats them to the punch, tearing at his own flesh in a frenzy. In Bocaccio's Decameron, Argenti's ire is raised by a practical joke played by Ciacco,  It's been said that Filippo Argenti once slapped Dante, that his brother had claimed Dante's possessions after his exile, and that the whole Argenti family opposed Dante's return. Dante held some pretty big grudges and the Hollanders explain the character in this gloss from their edition of L'Inferno.

“From the cries of others the reader finally learns the name of this sinner (Dante has known exactly who he is—see v. 39). Filippo Argenti was a Black Guelph from a powerful Florentine family. His real name was Filippo Adimari de’ Cavicciuoli, but he supposedly was known as Filippo Argenti because he had his horse’s hooves shod in silver (argento). A number of early commentators relate that his brother, Boccaccino, got hold of Dante’s possessions when the poet was exiled. If that is true, we have here a pretty clear case of authorial revenge upon a particularly hated enemy. See Francesco Forti, “Filippo Argenti,” ED, vol. 2, 1970, pp. 873–76.”

Excerpt From: Dante, Robert Hollander & Jean Hollander. “The Inferno.” 

Inferno VII: The Wrathful Smite Each Other in the River Styx

Inferno VII: The Wrathful Smite Each Other in the River Styx

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

Canto seven includes a scene of great ferocity, as those whose anger and spiteful nature guided them in life are condemned to beat, kick and bite one another while floating in the River Styx.

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Dante had a ferocious sense of humor and this is evidenced throughout L'Inferno, wherein he subjects friend and foe alike to dreadful fates—punishments ranging from the inconvenient to the inhumane. He reserved a great deal of his ire for political rivals who are eternally tortured, burned and humiliated in the bowels of Hell. And, while he pitied the misfortune of the timing, he added historical figures who (sometimes merely because they were born before Christianity was in flower) were doomed to lives of boredom, aimlessness or shame. 

In one of my favorite scenes, dozens of furious souls are damned to partake in a raging battle in the bloody River Styx in Canto Seven. Arriving on the scene he sees all manner of chaos and carnage happening among the participants—an angry, mud-soaked mob immersed in the bloody waters, biting, kicking, drowning, punching and slapping each other. 

And yet, somehow this scene carries with it a terrific sense of absurdity, and it's tough to explain why. I suppose the very notion of people immersed in blood, attacking one another with utter malice is terrifying, but somehow it's worth a chuckle:

In la palude va c’ha nome Stige

questo tristo ruscel, quand’ è disceso

al piè de le maligne piagge grige.

E io, che di mirare stava inteso,

vidi genti fangose in quel pantano,

ignude tutte, con sembiante offeso.

Queste si percotean non pur con mano,

ma con la testa e col petto e coi piedi,

troncandosi co’ denti a brano a brano.

_____________________________

It becomes a swamp by the name of Styx,

this sorry brook, when it descends

at the foot of the malignant, grey shore.

And I, who stood intent,

saw muddy people in the quagmire,

all of them naked and inflamed.

They struck each other not only with their

hands, but with their heads, breasts and feet,

and tore each other piece by piece with their teeth.

For me, head butts are entirely reminiscent of the theatrical absurdity of pro wrestling, and Dante's refined and shocked countenance adds a bit more to the spectacle. 

Inferno VI: Cerberus

Inferno VI: Cerberus

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

In the sixth canto, Dante and Virgil encounter Cerberus—the three-headed hound of hell—who guards their passage with his fercious barking as he lords over miserable sinners, writhing in the mire below.

*    *    *

This is a classic case of a good idea gone wrong. Its compositional lethargy is the result a my well-intended yet ill-conceived notion that, by placing Cerberus in the center of the image and surrounding him with a heaving mass of pathetic souls writhing on the ground beneath him, I could metaphorically represent the scene without showing the literal geography. I was trying to introduce some variety to my repertoire of visual presentation tropes. 

I think that most conceptions of this moment in L'Inferno picture Cerberus perched on a rock, enabling him to survey the bodies below while rain and huge hailstones pummel the crowd. But what I've created is not sufficiently depicting that dynamic and, instead, Cerberus is simply plopped in the center of the image, hovering sans gravity and sitting at the same time. The hail disappears when it's superimposed over the figures. So many bad decisions—this is definitely a "do-over" when I have time.

The saving grace for me is the figures themselves, which were a joy to draw in all their puling agony. Nothing like a little misery to brighten one's spirits.

Inferno V: King Minos, The Adjudicator

Inferno V: King Minos, The Adjudicator

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

The dead line up to confess their sins to King Minos, who encircles himself with his serpentine tail, the number of times it girds his body corresponding directly to the circle of hell to which each soul is destined. The Prince of the Lilies, from Knossos on Crete, served as inspiration for the costuming.

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In one of the most unnerving moments of L'Inferno, Dante and Virgil observe King Minos holding court over countless souls who must report to him their transgressions before he can damn them to the appropriate circle of Hell. Dante often indulges in generous poetic license to re-imagine characters from myth and history, and his chimeric mutation of Minos from ancient Greek King to serpentine monster is one of his most colorful and sinister characterizations.

The Prince of the Lilies, a fresco unearthed at Minos' infamous Knossos palace (where beneath the floors lurked another hybrid beast, the Minotaur) gave me a great head start in imagining the adjudicator's flair for elaborate, peacock-and-lilies headdress and long, wavy locks.

Inferno IV: The Great Poets

Inferno IV: The Great Poets

Ink on paper, 2016

22 x 15”

In esteemed and honorable company, Dante is invited to walk alongside the shades of four ancient poets, thereby placing himself among giants of verse, but slyly doing so in the guise of fictional narrative. Here he meets Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan, all wandering expressionless in Limbo.

*    *    *

After the "Gates of Hell" drawing (27 January), I realized that I was setting a stylistic and technical precedent that would be tough to live up to in the time I had allowed to finish the project. Creating so much density and complexity with a 00 Rapidograph pen would be tough. So, I took a gamble and developed an image of the four poets which was much lighter in tone. My hope was that the delicate lines would adequately express the spectral nature of these four shades. I pick up the lighter treatment again later, and I'm pretty pleased with the unity of the series. In fact, I'm glad I did this, because the shifting qualities of each—while related to the others—provides a little variety in the sequence.

The encounter described in Canto IV displays Dante's considerable ego and false humility in full flower. Staging a fraternal invitation by four of the greatest poets to have ever walked the earth was a pretty convenient way to exalt his own status as a living poet, all the while humbling himself by proclaiming his unworthiness.