Hell (Inferno)

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Dante and Virgil (detail), 1850, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Inferno, the new exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale, is the latest in a series of cultural events to mark the 700th anniversary of the death of the Tuscan poet, Dante Alighieri. With more than 200 works from the Middle Ages to the present, its curator, Jean Clair - for many years the director of the Picasso Museum in Paris - sets out to presenting Hell in all its forms. These include, for example, Pieter Huys’ Inferno (1570), Sandro Botticelli’s The Map of Hell (1480-90), William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Dante and Virgil (1850), Boris Taslitzky’s 1945 film, Le petit camp à Buchenwald, and a work by Rachel Kneebone. Perhaps its most ambitious exhibit is a plaster cast model of Auguste Rodin’s The Gates of Hell (conceived in the 1880s) which belongs to the Musée Rodin.