The Minataur 

Gustave Doré's "The Minotaur" plunges us into the nightmarish vision of Dante's Inferno. Doré was a 19th-century French artist who became famous for illustrating literary works. This image, with its dramatic contrasts and swirling lines, visualizes the bestial rage of the Minotaur, a creature trapped between worlds. The image evokes the cultural anxieties of Doré's time, particularly around the idea of atavism - the fear of regression to a more primitive state. We can see how the artist uses this classical reference point to comment on the social structures of his time. To truly understand this artwork, we would need to delve into the visual language of 19th-century Romanticism, and the institutional history of the art market and how artists circulated their works.