Salvador Dali - The Divine Comedy - original engraving

Wood engraving, on vellum paper BFK Rives, signed Dali in the board, representing three surrealist characters, taken from his series the divine comedy, 1963. The press mark of the wooden matrix is clearly visible in the contours of the board; the mark of the vellum paper is legible in watermark. Dimensions of the lithograph: 33x26 cm. "In 1950, the Italian government commissioned Salvador Dalí to illustrate the Divine Comedy to celebrate with an artistic publication the 700th anniversary of Dante's birth. Between 1950 and 1959, Dalí produced 101 watercolors depicting the 100 songs of the Divine Comedy, plus the title page. The project was nevertheless abandoned, because the Italian public hardly accepted that the illustration of the masterpiece of the great national poet had been entrusted to a Spaniard and not to an Italian. In April 1959, Salvador Dalí presented his watercolours to the French printer, Jean Forêt, who agreed to publish them with the text of the Divine Comedy in French. After 55 months of hard work to transpose the watercolors into plates for printing, on November 23, 1963, the edition was finally completed. Dalí's watercolours are reproduced using a colour woodcut technique; this involves the realization of 3500 wooden blocks, 35 blocks for each of the 101 watercolors, which make it possible to render the very rich palette of colors used by Dalí, with all their shades. In the illustration of the Divine Comedy, Salvador Dalí always oscillates between "reality" and "dream". He thus manages to represent the "surreality" devoid of all constraints of reason, aesthetics and morality, which is reflected in the dreamlike, abstract, fantastic and Freudian dimension, as emphasized by the critics of his art. Salvador Dalí's dreamlike journey through the Divine Comedy shows us the extraordinary timeliness of Dante's poetic work, which still calls us today to question the relationship between good and evil, between the divine and the earthly, between man and God." Nadia Togni

Ref. : BTRHG7AP