Designing Limbo

There is not a whole lot of description in Dante’s Inferno. Was that an oversight, or the limitations of the poetic form? Artists over the years have had a crack at interpreting what are the compelling visuals inferred from Dante’s verse, but only a few have tried to make it a  “lived in” environment that make physical sense. Dante’s description of the City of Limbo is terse, to say the least:

                                    …At foot
 Of a magnificent castle we arriv’d,
 Seven times with lofty walls begirt, and round
 Defended by a pleasant stream.  O’er this
 As o’er dry land we pass’d.  Next through seven gates
 I with those sages enter’d, and we came
 Into a mead with lively verdure fresh.

There’s no real reason WHY this stuff exists in Hell, or who built it and why, but Dante isn’t interested so much in world building–but he left some challenging problems for those of us who ARE. 

For a start, having a seven-walled castle is very poetic, apparently relating to seven virtues–i.e., you don’t get into this relatively pleasant part of Hell except by having to attain the seven virtues–but it is pretty difficult to portray realistically. Initially I wanted to go a direction where we would have one wall and seven gates on that one wall, but then I thought about all of the World Lit students and graduates out there who would have held my feet to the fire and I relented. I also wanted to have it look as if it was built in one style, had fallen into disrepair, and then patched up and rebuilt in different styles, but that would have added too much visual complication to the idea of seven walls, not just for myself, but for the reader as well.

There reference pictures I went with are the best that I could find that had a crack at the city itself, in anything like its entirety. The medieval book illustration is more representational than helpful, but Bottecelli had a much better crack at it. It helped solve some of my problems of space, and also what it might look like from a viewpoint not on its same circle, which is an unforeseen visual challenge I’m having to face for this project.

All in all though, I’m really happy with where I’m being forced to go artistically for this project.

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