Art, Symbol & Imagination
Dante Lost in the Dark Wood
A solitary robed traveller stands among towering trunks, exposed roots and dark foliage, turning his face toward a narrow opening in the wood. The poem opens with the traveller unable to find the straight way through life. Doré gives this uncertainty a physical setting: the tangled foreground offers no obvious path and the trees greatly exceed the figure in scale. The brighter trunk behind Dante helps the eye find him without turning the forest into a safe place. The plate's opening-line caption ties the image to the start of the journey rather than to a later infernal landscape.
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Citation
Gustave Doré (design). "Dante Lost in the Dark Wood" [editorial title]. In Dante's Inferno, Dante Alighieri. New Edition, undated supplied scan, undated edition, Thompson & Thomas. Source scan leaf 17. Lumitheca. /gallery/image/inferno-dore-10
Source details
Editorial title and description. Source details from the Library catalogue.
Full source plate visually inspected; original scan tone retained. Editorial title. Sideways bound plates turned upright in the derivative only; source and reader unchanged.
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Gustave Doré (design). Dante Lost in the Dark Wood. Dante's Inferno. Scan leaf 17. Lumitheca. https://lumitheca.com/gallery/image/inferno-dore-10