Dan Brown’s new bestseller Inferno takes his hero Robert langdon on the flight of his life around Florence, a city associated with the cream of classical European art. Shana Maria Verghis looks at works linked with the book, like Boticelli’s map of Satan’s lair
If one is an art enthusiast, the best part about Dan Brown, the writer who gave us Da Vinci Code, is the manner in which he can delightfully combine nail-biting storytelling, with lectures about art history.
In that book, which has become a cult classic that created a renewed interest in secret societies, his city of interest was Paris. And even those who like pulp got a crash course in high-brow art.
Brown’s latest novel, Inferno (Random House) is set in Florence. And it uses Dante Aligheri’s classic as the basis for another roller-coaster narrative, using the same protagonist, Robert langdon.
For those unfamiliar with Dante. Here’s a brief. It is a long allegorical poem about the afterlife, originally written by Dante Aligheri, who lived between 1308-1321. langdon himself features in the verses, divided into three parts, Inferno, Purgatario andParadiso. Translating as hell, purgatory and paradise — which were realms of the dead based on the pre- Christian notion of where a human soul goes, once it has passed on.
The work was apparently based on the creator’s state of mind and supposed separation from his love Beatrice (if she existed at all). Followed by life in exile.
It begins during a night before Good Friday in 1300. And the Inferno allegory is about the soul seeing sin for what it is. He writes of three beasts representing violence, malice, self-indulgence. And he divides hell into nine sections, with an upper hell — consisting lust, gluttony, anger and avarice.
There is limbo. And there is Satan.
Dan Brown uses the Christian idea of hell in all its misery and gloom, as the basis for an elegant artistic literary puzzle, whose lame conclusion you kind of figure one-fourth of your way through the book. It involves population control in a wicked way. Spoiler alert. But the way he gets you there is very enjoyable
What the author also achieves, (because of his huge passion for art history) is squeeze in another lesson about art. The Divine Comedy, and the Inferno in particular, (probably because people are drawn more easily to the morbid that light) inspired many artists of Dante’s time and through the Renaissance, which is when Florence, the seat of the action in Brown’s book, is based.
Through his poem, Aligheri had managed to scare the pants of people — because the language was a kind of low-Italian of that time, which was popular with the masses. So they could be have the heeby-jeebies put in them about guilt, sin and all the rest of the darkness, in their own tongue
And when the artist, Sandro Boticelli (1445–510), took over, the Catholic church was thrilled to bits, because apparently attendance rose like never before.
Boticelli is famous for giving a visual to the idea of a dark underworld with its lord and master, Satan, presiding in the mire for damned souls.
His famous painting of the Map of Hell (see main picture), was particularly horrifying for people of that age.
Though it resembles a chandelier with people parts, and seems a bit funny these days, it drew directly from the Inferno, which he made over a 100 illustration about.
There were different punishments meted out for different kind of sinners. Depending on the colour of your depravity. You could be standing your head at one level, drowning in your own slush.
You could be drowning in the faecal matter resulting from some other sin. Come to think of it, current reality was far less problematic that the punishments that the writer and later, the painter, had in store. Boticelli and Dante were both past-masters at giving a sense of something tangible to what would have been going on in people’s minds when preachers spewed on about hell and brimstone.
If it was eerie when heard at the pulpit, it must have been far worse in the human mind.