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It’s been over 700 years since Dante Aligheri found himself, midway along the journey of his life, within a dark forest. His terza rima epic, The Divine Comedy, rivets us still…. and as Hunter Dukes recounts, raises questions…

Ever since the publication of Dante’s Divine Comedy, scholars and artists have tried to map the Inferno’s architecture, survey Purgatory, and measure their way across the spheres of Paradise. The first cosmographer of Dante’s universe was the Florentine polymath Antonio Manetti, whose unpublished research — which mathematically concluded that hell was 3246 miles wide and 408 miles deep — inspired the woodcuts used for a landmark 1506 edition of the poem. In 1588, a young Galileo weighed in, deriving Lucifer’s height and armlength (1200 and 340 meters respectively) and suggesting that the Inferno’s vaulted ceiling was supported by the same physical principles as Brunellesci’s dome. The scholarly tradition continued for centuries, culminating with the works of Michelangelo Caetani, who designed a series of maps and charts. These were published as The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri Described in Six Plates and appeared in two editions, an 1855 edition featuring hand-colored lithographs and an 1872 edition printed using an early form of chromolithography, deployed by an order of monks at Monte Cassino near Rome…

Learn more about Caetani and his approach, and see more of his work: “Diagramming Dante: Michelangelo Caetani’s Maps of the Divina Commedia,” from @hunterdukes in @PublicDomainRev.

* Dante Alighieri

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As we chart cosmology, we might recall that it was on this date in 1971 that Michael Hart launched the source of the link to The Divine Comedy embedded above, Project Gutenberg, and effectively invented ebooks. It debuted on ARPANET.

An online library of free ebooks, it currently has over 70,000 items available (in plain text as well as other formats, such as HTML, PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and Plucker wherever possible).

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