The Divine Comedy

Born in 1265 in Florence, from which he was banished in 1302, dying in Ravenna in 1321, Dante set the Divine Comedy in the year 1300, when he was thirty-five years old and 'in the middle of our mortal life'. The setting allows him to utilise the past symbolically, exploit the present politically, and anticipate the future in simulated prophecy. The "Commedia" throughout reflects his love for 'Beatrice' whom he first saw at a young age in a church in Florence, and who came to represent for him Intellectual and Spiritual Beauty. The story of his love for her, her early death, and his inspiration to write the Commedia are told in his prose work "La vita nuova," The New Life, of 1294. While never returning to Florence after his banishment, the city remained a crucial focus of his thoughts and memories, and while eating the 'bitter bread' of exile his meditations on that city, on Beatrice, and on the moral challenges of his age, led as he had promised in The New Life, to this great work, of explanation, aspiration, and ultimately spiritual exaltation. Paul Gustave Doré (January 6, 1832 to January 23, 1883) was a French artist, engraver, illustrator and sculptor. Doré worked primarily with wood engraving and steel engraving. In 1853, Doré was asked to illustrate the works of Lord Byron. This commission was followed by additional work for British publishers, including a new illustrated English Bible. A decade later, he illustrated a French edition of Cervantes's Don Quixote, and his depictions of the knight and his squire, Sancho Panza, have become so famous that they have influenced subsequent readers, artists, and stage and film directors' ideas of the physical "look" of the two characters. He continued to illustrate books until his death in Paris following a short illness. The city's Père Lachaise Cemetery contains his grave.