Dante Aligheri, William Blake & Jane Gemayel

DIVINE COMÉDIE - ILLUSTRATIONS BY J.G

Another profile of Jane Gemayel's work is undoubtedly her talent for reproducing Dante's work by William Blake. An appropriation that can be seen in its delicate form, but which Jane has magnified with virtuosity.   

Dante Aligheri is known as the father of the Italian language, choosing to use Tuscan rather than Latin as was the custom at the time.

Written at the beginning of the 14th century, the Divine Comedy is a poem recognised as one of the masterpieces of literature that recounts Dante's journey through a supernatural world in three stages called Cantiche : Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. This epic narrates Dante's adventures following Lucifer's fall from Heaven and precipitation to the Earth's centre, where he remains trapped in ice. In his fall, Lucifer is said to have dug Hell, divided into nine circles in which the damned are cursed, differentiated according to the seriousness of the crimes they have committed and whose punishments are increasingly terrible.

Purgatory is at the other end of the underworld, through the most difficult and impossible entrance for the damned. It is shaped like a mountain, also formed by the fall of Lucifer. It is divided into seven circles with the Garden of Eden at its top. To reach it, sinners must atone for their faults through these seven circles.

Once in Paradise, there are nine spheres in which the higher one rises, the purer that which is found, and the presence of God becomes closer and closer until it reaches the Trinity. Dante succumbs to a vision, impossible for mere mortals to see. This dazzling vision prevented him from leaving Paradise and returning to Earth.

William Blake, an English painter and poet of the 19th century, was always particularly interested in mythology and mysticism.  A true prodigy, he paved the way for Romanticism in the mid-19th century and pursued his art to the point of receiving his biggest commission ever : the illustrations for Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. 

Already familiar with Dante's work, he had a preference for the character of Ugolino, who had been condemned to eat his own children in the underworld over and over again. Learning Italian to understand Dante's work as intimately as possible, he created 102 sketches and 7 engravings, most of which remained unfinished, as he died only 3 years after receiving this request.

But Jane did not choose to create new illustrations of the Divine Comedy, but chose to rework those of William Blake in order to interpret them in her own way. 

She chose to illustrate with her talent The Whirlwind of the Lovers, an illustration of Song V of the Divine Comedy. In this drawing in graphite, pen and watercolour, Dante asks Virgil the identity of those who have fallen into lust and he shows him Achilles, Helen, Dido and Cleopatra.

Jane Gemayel has once again succeeded in highlighting the female body in her work. The faces of the characters do not seem to be gendered and one seems to recognise only female bodies, unlike William Blake who represented both genders in his illustration.

Jane's work is much less dark and is bathed in the colour blue, one of her favourites. In Jane's work, all bodies are perfectly drawn and even the backgrounds are humanised. The humanisation of the bodies in this work seems to be the ultimate achievement of Jane's desire to sublimate the human being through her sensitivity.

If for William Blake, The Lovers' Whirlwind refers to death, Jane wanted to offer them the possibility of a second life.