Amos Nattini's Twentieth Century Vision Of Dante's Hell

3 Feb

Originally shared: Monday 7 December 2020

Amos Nattini was born in Genoa, Italy, on March 16, 1892. On reaching 18 years in 1910 he attended the life drawing school of the Academy of Fine Arts and the anatomical courses of the University of Genoa, venturing to Paris after graduating in 1914.

In 1921, when Nattini was 29 years, the sixth century celebrations of Dante's 'Divine Comedy', 1321, lead Nattini to undertake the over twenty-year effort to create 'one hundred images' of the 3 books 'Inferno' (Hell), 'Purgatorio' (Purgatory), and 'Paradiso' (Heaven) having started painting 'Inferno canto XII', 'Purgatorio canto XXVII', 'Paradiso canto XXXIII' in 1915. It was in 1939 that he finished the illustrations and the first edition of the work was published in 1941.

Before finishing the works the illustrations were shown in displays in Florence, Genoa, Milan, Rome, Turin, Brescia, Viareggio, Naples, Paris, The Hague, and Nice.

King Vittorio Emanuele III was present at the launch in 1927 of the 'Imagini' exhibition held in Rome at Dante's House at the Torre degli Anguillara , where he received the first canticle printed at the time as a gift. Another two copies were donated both to the head of government, Benito Mussolini, and to Pope Pius IX who defined define the works as “opera veramente michelangiolesca” - “truly the work of Michelangelo”.

Finally in 1941 the monumental finished edition of the Divine Comedy, printed using lithography in a press on hand made paper and with characters designed by the illustrator himself, was completed. A copy of the Divine Comedy, as an emblem of the spirit of Italian art, was donated by the Duce to Hitler on a visit to the 19th century Italian Exhibition.

Though his works were praised by dictators, during the years of the Resistance (approx 1943 - 45, after the death of Mussolini in 1943) opposing Nazi-fascism, he was arrested and imprisoned by the Gestapo for having given hospitality and help to English prisoners who escaped from the concentration camp of Fontanellato, before he was released to flee to the Apennines. With the end of the war he was elected municipal councilor of Collecchio in the ranks of the Socialist Party and in 1946 he held, for six months, the position of first Mayor after the Liberation.

After an extended period of silence it was in 1960 that he had his first post war show at the Camattini Gallery in Parma.

On the 3rd of October 1985, he died in Parma at the age of ninety-three: he was buried in the small cemetery of Oppiano.

[The above is paraphrased and adapted from the Italian Wikipedia article about Amos Nattini - link]

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The wonderful watercolour illustrations that follow come from the 1941 edition of "A Divina Comédia" (La Divina Commedia), by Dante Alighieri, published in Italian by the Istituto Nazionale Dantesco: "Exemplare numero quattrocentottantuno", by Ottavia de Lorenzi Guilidi, with illustrations by Amos Nattini. You can see an online digitised .pdf version of the book Inferno that has purposefully been placed in the Public Domain by Brasil's National Digital Library here (link). These images below are not the complete selection of images for Inferno, Nattini also painted images for Purgatory and Paradise that you can see at this following link on the blog site of Iba Mendes (link).