Inferno According to Dante c. 1470th century

This engraving of the Inferno, after Dante, probably made by someone in Baccio Baldini’s circle, shows the circles of hell in meticulous detail. Imagine the act of making this print. The artist, bent over a metal plate, carefully incising each line with a burin. It’s a slow, deliberate process. A real labor. I wonder what they were thinking about as they brought Dante’s vision to life? Were they scared? I think they must have been, with all these demons and tortured souls… The linear detail, all those tiny marks, they all build up to create a vision of chaos and suffering. But isn’t there also a weird kind of beauty in it? The way the artist has organized this image and made something so disturbing so compelling, there’s something really beautiful there. I'm so amazed at all the detail, the sheer number of bodies. It reminds us that artists are in an ongoing conversation across time, taking up and transforming each other’s ideas.