The Vision of Hell (Inferno)

Dante Alighieri

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Out of his facility for grotesque humor and gaslight melodrama, Doré; invented some 10,000 illustrations for books and magazines that were duplicated for simultaneous publications in Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, Saint Petersburg, Stockholm, London, and Haarlem. With illustrated editions of the Bible, Dante's Inferno, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Poe's The Raven, and a host of other classics popular at mid-century, he was the reigning master of the coffee-table book. To save the time it would have taken to draw in line, he often painted boxwood blocks with tones of ink and opaque white for engravers to interpret by inventing lines and dots.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art