Claudio Sacchi

L'Inferno Di Claudio Sacchi

In this year of Dante's celebrations, Olschki publishing house confirms her historical attention toward the Author. A new iconographic itinerary of the first Cantica of the Divina Commedia, presented for the first time. The volume will accompany several traveling exhibitions in Italy and abroad, starting with the one to be inaugurated in Florence at the Accademia delle Arti e del Disegno (4/12/2021-3/01/2022). Sacchi reinterprets the Inferno and accepts the challenge of joining the ranks of illustrators who, from the first fourteenth century illustrators to Botticelli, Blake and Dore, to name but a few of the greats who have measured themselves against Dante's journey. There are 12 paintings (large, made with oil technique, exposed together with 4 drawings, presented for the first time) that tell the Inferno through a choice of canti (I, III, V, IX, X, XII, XVII, XXVI, XXXIII, XXXIV) taken to narrate the entire Cantica for the comprehensive representation of the multiplicity of characters, lights that explode in colors, whose brightness always evokes the darkness of the context. Complex architectures and mythological characters, monsters, human figures that through their bodies give shape to their damnation, up to Lucifer who chews the great sinners, according to Dante's text: the power of the image suggests imprisoned inside the cruel icon of the First Devil, the sorrowful shadow of the First Damned. And along the way Dante wrapped in his red cloak - as per tradition - and defined by the silence that is man's silence before the great questions.