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Visions of Dante

Artistic Inspirations

Michael Mazur

A master of chiaroscuro in printmaking and an artist often drawn to somber subjects, Mazur’s journey with Dante began with his first reading of The Divine Comedy as an art student in Florence in 1958. In the 1990s, Mazur was asked to provide thirty-six monotype images for a new English translation of Inferno by American poet Robert Pinsky, which appeared in 1994. Building on these images, Mazur completed the Inferno di Dante series of etchings in 2000.

In Mazur’s estimation, “the most overriding element of the whole Inferno is…in fact, the sadness of the Inferno. That is why the Inferno has its legs.”[1] In this sense, Mazur’s works harmonize well with Dante images from his teachers and contemporaries Leonard Baskin and Rico Lebrun, shown in the same gallery.

Michael Mazur
American, 1935-2009
Inferno I: IV Limbo, from L’Inferno of Dante, 2000
Etching
25 1/4 x 19 3/4 inches (64.14 x 50.17 cm)
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College
Purchase, Philip and Lynn Straus, class of 1946, 2002.42.12
Image credit: Michael Mazur; Courtesy of the estate of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York
(1 image)

Mazur approaches this rendering of Limbo, where Dante names the poets and thinkers of classical antiquity, by foregrounding the columned ruins of an ancient Greek or Roman temple. Thus, a visual artist’s homage to the greatness of classical architecture mirrors Dante’s own tribute to the ancient poets he reveres (see also Marcantonio Raimondi, Apollo sitting on Parnassus surrounded by the muses and famous poets).


Michael Mazur
American, 1935-2009
Inferno I: XI The Overview of Hell, from L’Inferno of Dante, 2000
Etching
25 1/4 x 19 3/4 inches (64.14 x 50.17 cm)
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College
Purchase, Philip and Lynn Straus, class of 1946, 2002.42.30
Image credit: Michael Mazur; Courtesy of the estate of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York
(1 image)

As poet Lloyd Schwartz observed, “Mazur’s images compel us to identify with the poet’s primary experience: the bewildering sense of space — swirling, often mysteriously dislocated; the stupendous grandeur of the infernal architecture…” Here, Mazur’s dynamic vision accompanies the moment in Inferno’s eleventh canto when Virgil pauses to explain to Dante the layout of the lower circles of Hell, to which the violent and fraudulent are assigned. The effect of Mazur’s tilting bird’s eye view is disorienting; he convincingly depicts the circles of Hell—with the giants and the lake of ice visible at the very bottom—while also creating a perversion of the rings around celestial bodies. Like those, Hell is, after all, a divine creation.


Michael Mazur
American, 1935-2009
Inferno II: XX The Seers, from L’Inferno of Dante, 2000
Etching
25 1/4 x 19 3/4 inches (64.14 x 50.17 cm)
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College
Purchase, Philip and Lynn Straus, class of 1946, 2002.42.49
Image credit: Michael Mazur; Courtesy of the estate of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York
(1 image)

The seers or soothsayers, whom Dante and Virgil encounter in the eighth circle of Hell, are condemned to walk backwards, their heads twisted rearward and downward in payment for their fraudulent and presumptuous practice of telling the future, known only to God. Through his gradual diminishment of the size of the weeping figures, Mazur’s image captures, in a different way, the same fruitless and endless backward progression seen in the woodcut for this canto in the 1544 Venice edition of the Divine Comedy (see also Alessandro Vellutello, Inferno, Canto 20. The Circle of Soothsayers… and Giovanni Britto, Inferno, Canto 20).


Michael Mazur
American, 1935-2009
Inferno II: XXXIV The Giudecca - Lucifer, from L’Inferno of Dante, 2000
Etching
19 3/4 x 25 1/4 inches (50.17 x 64.14 cm)
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College
Purchase, Philip and Lynn Straus, class of 1946, 2002.42.81
Image credit: Michael Mazur; Courtesy of the estate of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York
(1 image)

In the final canto of Inferno, Dante and Virgil reach the very pit of Hell, reserved for traitors. Supreme among these traitors is Lucifer, formerly God’s chiefest angel, cast down for his rebellion against heaven. Gruesomely torn apart in Lucifer’s three mouths are the greatest of earthly traitors, Judas Iscariot in the center, who betrayed Christ, and to either side, Brutus and Cassius, who authored the assassination of Roman dictator Julius Caesar. In the contorted face of Lucifer, it is tempting to see the features of Mazur himself, a frequent and unsparing self-portraitist.


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Footnotes

[1] Pinsky, R., & Mazur, M. (1994). Image and Text: A Dialogue with Robert Pinsky and Michael MazurUC Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 37. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9sq464qr