Dante Gabriel Rossetti pays homage to Dante

It might seem like a play on words, that the poet Dante, whose work Divine Comedy, is represented by a painter that bears his name, but it is not. Dante Gabriel Rossetti has always had a passion for the art of poetry and painting, so that he himself wanted to change his first name to "Dante Gabriel" so to give him a more literary focus.
From his childhood "everything around me was impregnated with the influence of the great Florentine" he says. (http://www.centrorossetti.eu/c_home.asp?C=3)  

Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

The influence of Symbolism and Decadence

Rossetti became the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood  (http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/preraffaelliti/), a group of artists who in the mid-nineteenth century, stigmatized the sterile classicism of Raphael and his followers. Unable to unlock the truth behind things, Rossetti retrieved the medieval images, rich in symbols and references to the primitive purity of the three fifteenth-century painters.

Rossetti inherited all the taste of the mystic realism by Charles Baudelaire, though not his hatred towards nature considered malignant and mitigated through the spasmodic interest to the essence of things, but just the Symbolist and Decadent Europe, where our artist has its roots. Son of his time, the works of Rossetti represent a perfect combination of realism and symbolism, mysticism and truth, religion and passion.
The fruit of his art then originated by an interest in the sacred representations by Giotto - Italian painters before Raphael - tailed readings of Dante stilnovisti and the overwhelming feeling of nineteenth-century Romanticism.

The homage to Dante Rossetti : The Beata Beatrix

To honour Rossetti Florence decided, inspired from Dante's Vita Nuova and at the same time to pay homage to his beloved wife, Elizabeth Siddal, who died in 1862 following a lethal dose of laudanum, to draw her.
Beata Beatrix (1872) . Oil Painting presented at the Tate Museum in London.

Beata Beatrix painting.

The painting Beata Beatrix (1864-70, London, Tate Gallery) is an allegorical representation of love through the parallel between the death of Beatrice Portinari, described in Dante's Vita Nova (in particular section so XXXI , lines 24-28 "Mine eyes aching pity for the core") and the beloved "Lizzy", which in the eyes of Rossetti assumes an angelic sacred aura. So every element of the framework calls for a double interpretation: the look of Dante and the painter’s.
Beatrice Elizabeth poses ecstatic, with half-closed eyes and pink lips slightly open, waiting for her ascent to heaven, hands clasped as if she was waiting for the final blessing before going to Heaven. Her sacred beauty is even more highlighted by the halo of golden light that radiates from behind and welcomes her.

In the background rise the figures of two men who could recall Dante, on the right, that stears while Beatrice dies, almost as if wanting to give a final goodbye to his city, Florence (and the bridge in the background would represent its Old Bridge) but at the same time, if we read these symbols through the eyes of Rossetti; the man on the right could be the author himself, intent to see the rise of the beloved to the sky, and the bridge would be nothing but the Battersea Bridge over the Thames.

Behind the female figure is then a sundial and it is this that has particularly caught my attention: The sundial indicates the number 9, a number that recurs obsessively in Vita Nova constituting the assumption of the divine Beatrice. It is interesting to note that not only Dante encounters Beatrice for the first time at the age of nine years and the second time exactly nine years after the ninth hour of the day, but that the death of Beatrice (of which Dante speaks in Canto XXIX) occurs the ninth day of the ninth calendar month of the Arabic and Syriac for the calendar. In addition to this, in my opinion, a very important to decrypt the symbolism of the painting Rossetti is the fact that nine are also the moving heavens of Paradise according to the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic astronomy.

Dante and Beatrice, painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Finally, Dante Gabriel Rossetti is saying that his Elisabeth has all the requirements of Dante and Beatrice in Paradise as she arrives. That's the pain of the lover that takes shape in the painting. The red, symbol of love, finally gives the girl a twig of poppies, not arbitrary as it is from the seeds of the poppy which yields the laudanum, the deadly substance that killed Elizabeth.

Dante and Islam

According to some, at the base of the Divine Comedy there would be the mark of Islamic culture. For others, however, this would prove to be inaccurate. Dante Alighieri was known to be Islamophobic. Here is a controversial thesis of comparison.

An interpretation of Dante and his life depicted as Islamic.

In the Divine Comedy there is a strong presence of Islamic culture. Dante Alighieri was aware of the importance of Islam, although his relationship with the Muslim thinking was, at times, problematic and variable. The relationship goes from a scathing indictment toward Muhammad, to the use of images of the afterlife to rebuild the Muslim Hell and Paradise in the Divine Comedy.

The Divine Comedy is not original

Dante Alighieri took inspiration from the culture of Islam to make the journey to which he recounts in the Divine Comedy. In support there are several academics, including the Spanish priest Don Miguel Asin Palacios, Islamist and professor at the University of Madrid who in 1919 wrote “The Divine Comedy in the Muslim eschatology”.

Asin Palacios notes a number of similarities between the work of Dante Alighieri and some texts belonging to the Islamic tradition. In particular the Arabian tales of medieval afterlife with which Dante may have been in contact since the thirteenth century since in Muslim Spain there were many Muslim texts in circulation.

The entire structure of the Divine Comedy is very similar to the Miraj, an Arabic text that chronicles the rise of Muhammad to heaven and which, at Dante’s time, had already been translated into French and Latin. In the Divine Comedy even the Islamic text recounts the journey through the underworld and celestial spheres in order to meet God.

The cover of the Miraj, an Arabic text.

The similarities between the Divine Comedy and the Miraj are abundant. In example, the architecture of Dante's Inferno seems to be trodden on the Muslim Hell: both places are on fire, with a funnel shape, modeled on a series of levels that descend gradually and that the tip reaches the center of the Earth. The damned there are arranged according to the severity of their sins and there are allegorical beasts that stand in the way of the two travelers .

Arrived at the Paradiso, both Dante and Muhammad, see numerous angelic spirits who, ranked hierarchically, revolve around the Throne of God; and when they have the vision to the gods they find it difficult to describe what they saw .

In support of this thesis is also Donnarumma Raphael, a professor of Italian at the University of Pisa, which states that the apparent influence of Islam in the Divine Comedy indicates that Dante was fully aware of the importance of Islamic culture. In fact, in the Limbo, among the wise Greek and Latin heroes, we also find the Sultan of Egypt, Saladin, the Persian physician Avicenna and Averroes, Arab philosopher, with which Dante recognizes the spread of the thought and the works of Aristotle into neo-Latin culture.

Dante Alighieri was an Islamophobic

The contact between Dante and Islamic culture is, therefore, obvious. But not everyone consideres it positive. Gherush92, non-governmental organization for Human Rights, denounced the presence of Islamophobic and racist content in the Divine Comedy.

In Canto XXVIII of the Inferno, Dante describes the punishments inflicted on the sowers of discord, those who have lived to feel lacerations of political, religious, and family nature within life. Among these damned, there is also Mohammed. According to Dante, the Prophet of Allah is a Disseminators of scandal and schism and therefore Islam is a heresy.

In addition, the punishment that Dante attributes to Mohammed is atrocious: the body of the prophet is split from the chin to the backside and his guts hanging from the leg. Similar penalty for Ali, Muhammad's successor, who finds himself with his head split from the chin to the hair. According Gherush92 it is an image that insults the Islamic culture and, for this reason, asked the Minister of Education to abolish the Divine Comedy from school programs or at least to make the necessary comments and clarifications.

The cover a book discussing the controversial topic of Dante and Islam.

This is a request rather difficult to actuate since the Divine Comedy is considered a work of universal high value. In Italian schools it continues to be taught but it must be noted that the Arabic translation of The Divine Comedy, by the philologist Hassan Osman, has already been censured: there have been deliberately omitted some verses deemed offensive to the Islamic population.

Dante and Scandinavia

Even readers and intellectuals of Norway, Sweden and Finland know and appreciate Dante Alighieri. Among translations, including both poetry and film, the presence of Dante is alive and well among the Scandinavian fjords.

Because of the low prevalence of the historical sources that deal with the people of Scandinavia in 1300, Dante had a very limited knowledge of the confused and distant lands of the North, so much so that on one hand the Epistle V identifies the Lombards with the Scandinavians.

One of the earliest known translations of The Divine Comedy from 1613.

Today, however, knowledge and news travels fast. Dante Alighieri, universally appreciated writer in every corner of the earth, is a source of inspiration for writers of Northern Europe. Despite the culmination of Dante and his works in Scandinavia, compared to other central areas of Europe it was quite late, you can register a living presence of the Florentine poet in the modern and contemporary culture of Scandinavia.

The Finns have been able to read the works of Dante only in the twentieth century. It is in 1912, in fact, that the first translation of The Divine Comedy in Finnish was performed by Eino Leino, the largest lyric poet of the Finnish language. Later, the translation of the Vita Nova was published in 1920 to Tyyni Tuulio and a second version of the Divine Comedy in the work of the poet Elina Vaara in 1963; the occasion was the celebration of the seventh centenary of the birth of Dante.

After the entry of Finland into the European Union in 1995, there has been a significant increase in the reading of foreign books, including Italian ones. This was made possible thanks to contributions and translation projects financed by EU funds that have been added to the existing shares that Finland dedicated to the promotion of literature.

As far as the knowledge of Dante Alighieri among intellectuals in Sweden, the Florentine poet makes his entrance in Sweden at the turn of 1700 and 1800.

After making a trip to Italy in 1818, during which he read the Divine Comedy, romantic poet Daniel Amadeus Atterbom is inspired by the figure of Beatrice to create the character of Svanvit, the protagonist of his poetry Lycksalighetens ö - The island of bliss.
Since that time, Dante 's Divine Comedy became very popular in Sweden, now other writers are interested in the study of Dante and his writing. The poet and literary critic Carl Vilhelm Böttiger devotes several essays on Dante; the writer Oscar Levertin penned a peice titled Beatrice, dedicated to his deceased wife. The playwright August Strindberg admires Dante so much that in 1896 that he along with other Dante scholars, wrote the introduction in the Swedish language of the Italian word Inferno with the meaning of a situation or a state of mind particularly difficult.

Another old translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy.

The first Dante studies show a preference for more historical facts and biographical philosophy, allegory, and mysticism of Dante. It was not until the twentieth century that we saw a more detailed study of the world of Dante that takes into account, for example, the problem of evil, love, paganism and the Christian faith.
In more recent times, the passion for Dante continues to be vivid not only in literature but also in the seventh art: cinema. It’s in 1985 that the movie Red with finnish director Mika Kaurismäki, which is a film adaptation of a modern crime novel and the Divine Comedy.

The protagonist is a Sicilian killer who wanders the Scandinavian territories in search of his beloved, not without encountering many obstacles and challenges to overcome along the way.

The Polish director Lech Majewski, known for the film The Mill and the Cross (2011), was inspired by the Divine Comedy for his new feature film Oneiric - Field of Dogs, co-produced by Poland, Italy and Sweden, which is slated for April 17, 2014.
The protagonist of Oneiric, haunted by the Divine Comedy, lives a parallel life during sleep. His dreams, populated by Dante and damned with allegories, are the set in a contemporary love story, so visionary it is surprising.
The confirmation that the contemporary Norwegian readers appreciate Dante's work also comes from the Norwegian Book Club which entered the Divine Comedy in the top 100 of the best books ever.