| Dante: Hell on the Web |
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UNESCO Painter Illustrates La Divina Commedia
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"Anybody know any sources for recordings of Dante's La Divina Commedia?"
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The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, more commonly known as UNESCO, and the Russian painter Vladimir Liagatchev joined forces to recreate the world of Dante's Divine Comedy on the web. With a single image as a starting point, the site allows you to explore Dante's 700-year-old vision of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The site contains 120 paintings accompanied by extracts from the emblematic creation of the Italian artist (1265-1321). The graphic work, which maps Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, serves, at the same time, as an intellectual and technical navigation tool. By launching this project, UNESCO aims to demonstrate the possibilities offered by new technologies in the field of artistic creation. This initiative forms part of UNESCO's strategy to promote free and universal access to the common property of all nations.
This first large virtual UNESCO exhibition shows that "creation knows no boundaries and is enriched by the meeting and mixing of cultures," says Philippe Quéau, Director, Information and Informatics Division, whose web team has developed the site.
For Vladimir Liagatchev the paintings, which took 10 years to complete, is "a search for the interpretation of this poem, which is an important part of world heritage." "My 120 paintings accompany Dante's journey and acquire profound significance as the 20th century draws to its end and a new millennium begins with continued conflicts and controversies," says Vladimir Liagatchev.
Putting the 120 paintings of Vladimir Liagatchev with the texts of the Divine Comedy on-line on the UNESCO web site, gives a sense of wholeness to this work, so closely the painted universe reflects the universe dreamt by the poet. This project allows us to visualize a world which, due to its virtual nature and encyclopaedic complexity, was difficult, up to now, to access. The image demonstrates Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in the world as conceived by Ptolemy where the planets and the Sun revolve around the Earth, and takes the visitor of the site in to an incarnation of the poet's world view, represented as a Globe with a nucleus, stemming from our contemporary world view.
Vladimir Liagatchev, born in 1942 in ex-USSR, is a graduate of the Moukhina Institute of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, the Graphic and Polygraphic Arts Institute, Moscow and l'Ecole nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris. He currently lives and works in Paris. He has participated in numerous personal and collective exhibitions in various countries and is the winner of many prizes.
The UNESCO site isn't the first Dante hypertext. Digital Dante, a project of Columbia University's Institute for Learning Technologies, has been online for six years. About Dante! provides The Divine Comedy Text online, with an overview of the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, and a brief history of Dante Alighieri.
Hundreds of artists from Botticelli to Blake have produced illustrations for Dante's work, many of which are reproduced on the Digital Dante site.
