The Judaeo-Christian tradition lacks any goddess, unlike its predecessors in Mediterranean cultures. Is there an equivalent among its saints, or the Virgin Mary? An exploration in paintings.
Blake
Popular with painters during the early 1600s, copper sheets were used by Jan Brueghel the Elder, Adam Elsheimer, David Teniers the younger, William Blake, and Joseph Stella, among others.
Dante and Virgil sail to the island-mountain of Purgatory, where they are met by Cato. They then start its ascent, illustrated by William Blake, Doré and others.
The very best paintings showing Dante’s journey through Hell, as described in his Inferno. William Blake, Corot, Doré, Koch, and more.
Every lightning bolt tells a story, with paintings by Rubens, Richard Wilson, Poussin, John Martin, Adam Elsheimer, William Blake, and more.
The final canto of the Inferno takes Dante to see Lucifer himself, after which Virgil guides him back to the surface of earth.
Count Ugolino was a leading and treacherous politician, who could only be trusted to betray others. He was left to die in prison of starvation.
From the fraudsters in the last rottenpocket of the eighth circle of Hell, they move on the ninth circle of the treacherous – a frozen lake. Paintings by Doré, Blake, Bouguereau, and Fuseli.
From thieves, Dante and Virgil move on to meet souls of those who had committed fraud, including Ulysses, a headless troubadour, and an alchemist.
From barrators, being hacked at by a pack of devils in their boiling tar, through hypocrites wearing habits weighted with lead, to thieves being tormented by snakes. Sheer hell.
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