Artist book
Found in 2638 Collections and/or Records:
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXIX/1 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXIX/2 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXIX/3 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
XXIX/3 The reappearance here of the walls of A Folly for Wisdom (cf. IV/1) now broken and reassembled in a topsy-turvy fashion heralds the representatives of Sienese folly often caricatured by Florentines as Dante does here by mentioning some typical spendthrift fools such as Niccolo who was said to have used costly and exotic cloves as the fuel with which he cooked pheasants. The castle walls in their state of disarray and the upside down text on the arms of Siena (copied from a black and white print I saw in a Venice shop window) indicate the reversal of values that Dante castigates. The broken structure now contains, instead of poets and sages, samples of stupidity and decadence half drawn from the imagination and half from memories of school and university contemporaries. The green triangle (cf. Canto IV/1 and XVI/4) is also requoted in irony. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXIX/4 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXV/2 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXV/3 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
XXV/3 It is Ovid, the master of metamorphosis, whom Dante challenges to a stylistic dual, inviting the reader to witness his superior skill. Echoing once again the format of early book illustrations in keeping with the wealth of literary reference in the Canto, four quasi-Ovidian scenes surround a portrait of the poet (itself derived from various vague Roman likenesses). No precise events in Ovid's Metamorphoses are alluded to, though the original lithograph was itself achieved (using a series of transparencies of an original grisaille) by a process of metamorphosis. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXV/4 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
XXV/4 The fragments of Laocoon that were used as the frontispiece of this Canto in an emblematic and formal way are here reassembled (as the reptilian elements in the text reassemble and change) to make a more organic figuration. The classical elements are rearranged to form a mannerist/romantic group, a transcription of the original energies of the sculpture. The colouring is intended to recall the muscular feats of Michelangelo's supermen and the sexual implications of the formal elements are given free reign as if to combine the themes of the preceding illustrations. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXVI/1 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
Canto XXVI/1 GODI FIORENZA, the opening cry of this canto is here writ large (very large in fact since the original drawing for the lettering is fifty inches high) and in sombre colours, to stress its irony. The only gleam of relief lies in the slight displacement of positive and negative plates which, so to speak, by deliberate error serves to outline the words which would otherwise be almost indistinguishable. A Florence which Dante castigates for its loss of honour and brightness is here characterised by a lily in bloodless grey. The coarseness of texture implies a slogan in the manner of wall graffiti (`Up Arsenal' etc.) -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXVI/2 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
XXVI/2 Among the flames which, in an extended image, he compares to fireflies, Dante spies out five Florentines in the perpetual dusk. Here in what heraldry would call a `field' of stylised fireflies I have placed five reduced versions of the computer-distorted lilies already used in Canto XXIV/4. These have been highlighted both by the suppression of the background mezzotint and their being encircled, as if in the telescopic sights of a gun, by target-shapes (combinations in fact of Letraset photo-registration marks) which pinpoint them as unerringly as does Dante's scorn. The number 5 is the page number of the Human Document text. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXVI/4 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXVII/1 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXVII/2 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXVII/3 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
XXVII/3 In returning to Dante's running verbal vendetta against Pope Boniface VIII the initial illustration to Canto XIX is revisited. It tumbles now to emphasise the single key which indicates that this Pope at least can only make the dispensation of a long season in Hell, though he is seen here affording the impotent absolution that he gives to Guido. In the background the sign of blessing is seen parodied in a form reminiscent of the blasphemous gestures of Canto XXV/2. The image of Boniface comes from a drawing that I made in 1979 in the foyer of the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, where a poster featured his equestrian statue. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXVII/4 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXVIII/2 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
XXVIII/2 By singular good fortune a professional anatomist of distinction was numbered amongst the subscribers to the original book and Dr. B. Moxham has supplied anatomical information (cf. also XXXIV/3) and, most invaluably, the pictures of a sectioned corpse that I have used here. That the split cadavers are themselves split intc separate photographs that here are brought together as a fairly ill-fitting mosaic is itself appropriate. The worst-sliced figure can be thought to represent Mahomet (that is, as Dante thought of him) who speaks while poised to depart. The image is made up out of nine photographs with (in the original assemblage) gouache additions -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXVIII/3 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXVIII/4 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
XXVIII/4 Bertran de Born holds high his severed head in the midst of fractured wreckage of an imposing edifice, a house divided. Haunting this picture are my memories of houses ripped open by the Blitz. The structure is collaged from fragments illustrating many different kinds of building belonging to different social orders (the Schism of Class via palace and tenement) as well as places of worship of various kinds indicating religious factionalism. The smashing of what was once a unity is asserted by the identical pillars on either side of the riven entranceway. The text echoes Dante's image of the head held like a lamp to underline the implication that Bertran, a poet, should have illuminated the world with his intellect and eloquence instead of bringing it into deeper darkness. There is also a reminiscence in the image as a whole of the final vision of the Fall of the House of Usher. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXX/1 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
Canto XXX/1 Clarity, reason and judgement were represented in Canto XI by a head (selected from Canto III/1) shown against a graph to signify Aristotle and his systems of classification. Here, to represent madness, head and graph are cut up and the fragments scrambled and superimposed, all falling to the bottom of the image area. As Homer's mask is broken and elevated in Canto XXVI so Aristotle's is here debased by the flight from reason of the fraudulent. In terms of colour the graph has now become more real as it registers the lowest of this group of categories, mad bestiality. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXX/2 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
XXX/2 Within the crags and boulders of this Bolgia we find the forger Master Adam who falsified the coinage of Florence. A dropsical wreck, his vast middle makes his legs useless, and only one arm retains its strength. The hint of red recalls Master Adam's death by fire at the stake. Behind him Gianni Schicchi and Myrrha go on their endless rabid chase into the gloom, in search of souls to bite. The figures and the landscape in this, almost the most literal of the book's images, are concocted from Dore's illustrations to the Inferno. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.
Archive of the Limited Edition of Dante's Inferno: Canto XXX/3 / Phillips, Tom., 1983
XXX/3 The coins of Florence which were becoming an international currency (hence the Florins of Britain and Holland) showed the emblematic lily on one side and the figure of John the Baptist on the other (cf. Canto XIII/4). These were the coins that Master Adam falsified, by the addition of a percentage of dross to the metal (thus in his punishment he himself becomes swollen with waste matter). The progressive degradation of the coin in his hands is shown here by progressively more inaccurate pressings (of a rubber stamp that I had made of the coin) into the soft ground of the original plate, themselves progressively more crudely bitten. The image of the coin also rotates as one reads downwards through the image until one reaches the final punning text. The stamping on the plate seemed to have an appropriate relationship with coining and various metallic colours were used in the original printing. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.