Salvador Dali painted 101 watercolors between 1951 and 1960 to illustrate the richly imagined and intensely visual world of The Divine Comedy, the writing of which all but consumed Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) during the last decade of his life. Divided into three sections, the Inferno (Hell), Purgatory, and Paradise (Heaven), The Divine Comedy explores the theme of life after death with Dante himself as the main character. In the early 1950's, shortly before Dante's seven-hundredth birthday, Dali was invited by the Italian government to produce a series of illustrations for a deluxe edition of The Divine Comedy to be published in Rome. Dali created 101 watercolors for the book, but the reception in Italy was extremely negative since Dali was Spanish and not an Italian painter. Written in the vernacular instead of Latin at the time, The Divine Comedy became widespread, and led to the development of the modern Italian language, and as such, was a source of national pride. Dropped in Italy, the project would find new life when Dali met with French publisher, Joseph Foret, whom he had worked with before. The engraver, Raymond Jacquet, created the wood blocks necessary to transfer Dali's watercolors to wood engravings, a medium chosen because of its ability to recreate subtle washes of color and delicate linear drawing, with participation and final approval by Dali. Anywhere from twenty to as many as thirty-seven separate blocks were needed to reproduce the watercolors. 3,500 blocks were necessary to complete the engraving process for the entire suite. These blocks were burned after the printing. Divided into three groups of prints related to each canto of The Divine Comedy (thirty-four from the Inferno, thirty-three from Purgatory, and thirty-three from Paradise), the prints demonstrate his evolution from the early grotesque figurations to the mystical paintings that occupied him after the Second World War.
