Picture Piece: Dante’s Inferno
A perfect rendition of nothing
I was 19, I think. In the summer I had been in love, but now it was Winter and it was over. I trawled the bookshops until I found a copy of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Gustave Doré. I spent my rent money on it. I gave it to the boy hoping he would see the analogy between descriptions of eternal agony and my own hissy fit. Yeah, well – I was 19.
Naturally, I looked through it before handing it over. Certain pictures struck me, this one amongst them. It has an accompanying quote: ‘Look how thou walkest. Take good heed thy soles do tread not on the heads of thy poor brethren.’ I suppose it reminded me of that line of Yeats’: ‘I spread my dreams under your feet / Tread softly for you tread on my dreams.’ I was egocentric enough and masochistic enough to imagine the whole of Dante’s Hell as a metaphor for my love life. I was the soul trapped in a frozen continent, and he was to be careful where he stepped. The look on Virgil’s face (contempt) and on Dante’s (infinite pity) were the two things I feared most. You get older though, and things change, even pictures. It seems high romance to me now, to have imagined death, or the death of love, as a kind of public suffering, a great theatre – a place where you are still conscious. I think Doré knew better. Now when I look at it, my eyes move quickly from the frozen tortures to the genuine terror above – line upon line of textured black, a perfect rendition of nothing.
Zadie Smith
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