Dante and Virgil Painting

Dante and Virgil in Hell is oil on canvas and currently hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, in Paris. It was painted in 1850 by William-Adolph Bouguereau. It is a one-off, the artist never returned to this theme; maybe the intensity of the scene brought hell too close for comfort! The picture shows us Dante, accompanied by Virgil, wandering through the eighth circle of hell, the sector reserved for counterfeiters and falsifiers. They stop to witness an infernal combat, an unending fight to the death. The horror of the action is forceful: we see one combatant savagely biting the neck of the other while brutally kneeing his back. The desperation and the agony is strongly evident in the tense, straining muscles and the determined, combative faces. Yet, there is beauty here: the perfect, muscular bodies are depicted in harmonious lines which suggest a bold, supple strength. There is nothing static about the positions of the bodies, the scene is a fleeting moment of the combat - we fully perceive the movement and the fury of the fight. This horrific fight is between two damned souls, both condemned to eternal combat. The hellish circle they inhabit is the eighth circle, reserved for those who cheat, falsify and counterfeit in order to immorally or illegally improve their lot at the expense of others. The biting fighter, Gianni Schicchi, is a usurper who fraudulently adopted a dead man's identity in order to obtain an inheritance. He was duly sent to hell. The other fighter is an alchemist and heretic called Cappocchio. In an age when heresy and alchemy were deadly sins, hell was the inevitable final destination.