Gustave Doré was 28 and already famous when he decided to illustrate Dante's Inferno. French publishers were doubtful that a book of large, expensive engravings would sell, so Doré reportedly paid to produce the first edition himself. It appeared in 1861 and it worked. Doré went on to illustrate the rest of the Divine Comedy, as well as the Bible, Paradise Lost, and Don Quixote.
Doré's Dante is vast and dark. Here two tiny robed figures stand on a ledge, dwarfed by the cliffs and the steaming abyss below them. A bright burst of flame glows at the bottom, and tall rock walls close in on both sides. The scale is the whole point. Hell is not a room but a landscape, and its visitors are small.
The technique matters, too. Doré drew straight onto woodblocks, and teams of skilled engravers cut his drawings into the wood. The soft gradients of gray, which look nearly like photographs, come from thousands of tiny lines. Doré kept an enormous team busy for years, and he was said to work on several books at once.
His images have outlived his reputation. For a century, mainstream critics looked down on Doré as a mere illustrator, but his hell became the one that most readers pictured. When people today imagine Dante's descent, they usually see Doré's cliffs, chasms, and fire.
Doré's The Vision of Hell appears on our: