Art is the Solution

Arachne Source: indrasmusings.wordpress.com Literature is often a rich source of subject matter for artists. However, Dante’s Divine Comedy has inspired more than its fair share of art. I suppose envisioning a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven is really too full of creative possibilities to ignore! During the 1860s, French artist and illustrator Gustave Doré became part of this rich tradition when he decided to create a series of engravings to accompany Dante’s epic. Although Doré had trouble finding a publisher who was willing to take on the expense of printing such a long and heavily illustrated text, Doré’s illustrations have now become the quintessential images of Dante’s journey. Although Doré’s engravings of Hell are dramatic and disturbing, I think the most memorable and horrifying image comes from Purgatorio : the illustration of Arachne. In the twelfth canto of Purgatorio , Dante meets Arachne, a figure from Greek mythology. According to legend, Arachne was a we...

Puss in Boots Source: Wikipedia I’m told that today is National Cat Day, so I’d like to celebrate that with a particularly entertaining piece of cat art: Puss in Boots by Gustave Doré. Doré was a French artist who was best known for his illustrations of books and poems. He created this engraving of Puss in Boots to accompany the cat’s story in a book of fairy tales. The illustration depicts the character of Puss in Boots raising the alarm as another character drowns in the background; the original caption for the image read: "Help! The Marquis of Carabas is drowning." Although the engraving clearly displays Doré’s artistic skill (he was an acknowledged master of the woodcut-engraving technique), its true charm comes from Doré’s creative use of detail. The cat is resplendent in a pair of truly extraordinary boots, a necklace of bird’s heads, and a brace of dead mice hanging from his belt. The cat stands on two legs with an animated, almost human expression. Doré’s de...