Dante’s Inferno: Journey to the Centre of Hell
Journal Two — From the City of Dis to Lucifer
We have crossed the River Styx.
Behind us are the first five circles of Hell — Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed and Wrath.
Ahead, glowing through the darkness, is the City of Dis.
And from here, Hell changes.
The journey becomes more violent, the punishments more disturbing and the imagery increasingly strange. We will encounter heretics burning within tombs, the Minotaur, rivers of blood, forests made from human souls and landscapes scorched beneath falling fire.
And then we reach the part of this artwork that became something quite extraordinary to construct.
The Eighth Circle.
Ten ditches descend through that great structure of hand-beaten copper, populated by the painted souls we saw being created in my gallery. But now we're no longer interested in how I made it.
We're going to read it.
Every ditch has a story. Every punishment has a reason. Every figure was placed there because Dante gave me something to interpret.
And beneath all of it lies one final destination.
The Ninth Circle.
The frozen centre of Hell.
Lucifer.
In Journal One, my sculpture gradually rose as Dante travelled down. That physical crescendo will continue here, becoming larger and more intense until we reach the enormous Eighth Circle.
Then the direction changes.
After all that climbing, we fall.
So let's return to where I left you.
Across the dark waters of the Styx, something is glowing.
Welcome to the City of Dis.
Chapter One — The Sixth Circle: Heresy and the City of Dis
Across the Styx we saw it glowing in the distance.
Now we have arrived.
The City of Dis.
I wanted Dis to feel enormous — a towering, illuminated fortress rising out of Hell, surrounded by a landscape that is already burning.
At its base lies the valley of the burning mosques, their domes and towers glowing with fire. Before the city is the marsh Dante and Virgil have just crossed, while high above, flames burn like beacons.
Those flames have guided us here.
But arriving at Dis and getting inside are two very different things.
The Gates Are Closed
Dante and Virgil cannot simply walk into the city.
The demons within refuse them entry.
For the first time, Virgil's authority isn't enough to get Dante through. The journey appears to have reached an obstacle that the two travellers cannot overcome alone.
Then help arrives.
A heavenly messenger descends and opens the gates for them.
I loved that moment because we are deep inside Hell and yet something from Heaven can still enter this world and simply overcome the barrier that has stopped them.
So I placed the messenger directly before the enormous doors.
Around him, the marsh crashes against the entrance, waves splashing at the foot of the city, while the doors tower above.
The Women Above the Gates
At the top of the city I painted the three Furies.
They are bare-breasted, grasping and tearing at themselves, adding another disturbing layer to the entrance.
Again I found myself encountering figures from classical mythology within Dante's Christian Hell. The deeper I travelled into Inferno, the more these different traditions seemed to collide.
Above the great doorway I placed the symbol of the Underworld, marking the threshold we are about to cross.
Everything about this entrance is telling us that we are moving into another part of Hell.
Open the Doors
Once the heavenly messenger opens the gates, the interior is revealed.
And Hell seems to pour out.
I painted demons raining down through the opened doorway, tumbling into the scene as the city is breached.
Beyond them are rows upon rows of glowing openings.
Inside the City of Dis are the burning tombs of the heretics.
The dead are imprisoned within fiery sepulchres, the architecture itself becoming a vast burning cemetery.
Among them I included Popes burning within their coffins.
For me, that imagery also continued something I found fascinating about Dante: position and religious authority offer no automatic protection from his Hell. His world contains an uncomfortable mixture of theology, morality, politics, mythology and very human judgement.
Once you're inside his Inferno, titles don't necessarily save you.
Deeper Hell
The City of Dis isn't merely another location on Dante's journey.
It is a boundary.
Behind us lie the upper circles we've already travelled through.
Beyond these doors, the nature of Hell becomes increasingly severe.
That is why I made the city feel so monumental.
The burning buildings spread across the valley.
The marsh crashes against its entrance.
The Furies wait above.
The symbol of the Underworld marks the door.
The heavenly messenger forces the gateway open.
The demons tumble down.
And inside, the tombs burn.
We have crossed another threshold.
Welcome to deeper Hell.
And beyond the City of Dis waits the Seventh Circle — Violence.
Chapter Two — The Seventh Circle: Violence
Beyond the City of Dis we enter the Seventh Circle of Hell — Violence.
This circle interested me because Dante doesn't treat violence as one single thing. He divides it into three separate rings, depending upon where that violence was directed.
Violence against others.
Violence against oneself.
And violence against God, Nature and Art.
I decided to make those divisions physical.
My Seventh Circle is painted across three overlapping layers of steel, with each layer carrying us into another part of Dante's violent world.
The First Ring — Violence Against Others
The first layer begins with the Minotaur.
Once again Greek mythology had found its way into Dante's Hell.
I painted him as an enormous, enraged creature dominating the entrance, while behind and around him are the Centaurs, armed and patrolling the landscape.
Below them runs one of the most visceral features of this circle.
The river of boiling blood.
The souls condemned for violence against others are immersed within it, their bodies appearing at different depths as they travel through the river.
The Centaurs stand guard over them, weapons ready, ensuring that the condemned remain within their punishment.
I wanted the river to cut strongly through this first layer. The red is impossible to ignore amongst the otherwise dark, muted landscape.
We have seen plenty of water during this journey.
Charon's crossing.
The waters of Limbo.
The Styx.
But water has changed again.
Now it is blood.
The Second Ring — Violence Against Oneself
The second layer takes us somewhere completely different.
Into a wood.
But these aren't ordinary trees.
The trees are the souls.
I shaped their trunks and branches around the forms of human bodies. Faces emerge from bark. Breasts, torsos and limbs seem to grow from the wood until it becomes difficult to tell where human being ends and tree begins.
These are the souls of those who committed suicide, transformed into the Wood of the Suicides.
Above and amongst them are the Harpies, tormenting the trees.
Their suffering is written into the landscape itself.
I also painted part of the verse directly into this section because I wanted Dante's words to exist amongst the imagery rather than merely have the painting illustrate them.
The trees don't simply represent the story.
They tell it.
The Chained Dogs
Within this same landscape I included the two dogs, straining forward on their chains.
They add another sudden burst of aggression to a place that initially appears almost still.
That was important to me.
Nothing in this wood is really at rest.
The trees are human.
The Harpies torment them.
The dogs strain against their chains.
Even the forest itself seems to be suffering.
There is something particularly disturbing about this part of Dante's Hell because the punishment has completely altered the human form.
These souls don't merely exist amongst the trees.
They have become them.
The Third Ring — The Burning Sand
The final layer changes the landscape again.
The forest gives way to burning sand.
Here the souls are exposed beneath an impossible sky as fire rains down upon them.
I painted the bodies caught amongst the flames while more fire falls from above, creating punishment from both directions.
There is no shelter.
The ground burns.
The sky burns.
The souls exist between the two.
This is Dante's third division of Violence — violence against God, Nature and Art — and I wanted it to feel completely exposed compared with the claustrophobic forest beside it.
First we had blood.
Then wood.
Now fire.
Three Forms of Violence
That is why this particular painting needed its three layers.
I wasn't simply trying to fit three scenes onto one piece of steel.
I wanted the construction of the artwork to follow Dante's construction of Hell.
One circle.
Three rings.
Three layers.
On the first, the Minotaur, Centaurs and the river of boiling blood.
On the second, human trees, Harpies and chained dogs.
On the third, burning sand beneath a rain of fire.
Each landscape is different, but all three are connected by one idea.
Violence.
And by this point in the journey, the Hell I was building is becoming increasingly complex too.
The paintings are rising.
The layers are multiplying.
The punishments are becoming stranger.
But what comes next required something on an entirely different scale.
Because Dante's Eighth Circle isn't one punishment.
It contains ten separate ditches.
And somehow, I had to build them all.
Chapter Three — Circle Eight — Malebolge: The Fraudulent
By the time Dante and Virgil reach the Eighth Circle, Hell has changed.
This is Malebolge, the place reserved for fraud, and I wanted the descent into it to feel different from everything that had come before. Violence is terrible, but fraud requires something else: intelligence used deliberately against another person. Trust is understood and then exploited. A human quality becomes a weapon.
That idea is embodied perfectly by the creature who carries Dante and Virgil down into this circle: Geryon.
I painted him with the face of a seemingly kind and trustworthy man, but that appearance is a lie. His body becomes increasingly animalistic, ending in the tail of a scorpion with its sting waiting at the end. He is almost fraud made into flesh — reassuring at the front and dangerous behind.
Dante and Virgil climb onto him and are carried down beside the great waterfall into the darkness below.
In my painting, I wanted this moment to act almost like a gateway. Around it are remnants of the world they are leaving behind, while beneath them waits something much more complicated.
Because Circle Eight isn't a single landscape or a single punishment.
It is divided into ten separate ditches, or bolge, each containing a different form of fraud. Seducers, flatterers, corrupt churchmen, fortune-tellers, corrupt politicians, hypocrites, thieves, fraudulent advisers, those who created division and falsifiers all have their place here.
And this gave me an extraordinary visual problem.
How do you fit ten different punishments into one section of a painting without turning it into chaos?
My answer was not to tidy Hell up.
I let it become chaotic.
The eye has to travel through it, discovering one horror after another: bodies driven forward by demons, people submerged in filth, legs protruding grotesquely from holes, heads twisted backwards, bodies attacked and transformed, serpents, fire, disease, mutilation and figures struggling beneath impossibly heavy cloaks.
There is almost too much to take in.
That is deliberate.
Circle Eight is not something I wanted the viewer simply to look at. I wanted them to have to find their way through it.
Just as Dante does.
And the deeper we travel into Malebolge, the more distorted the human body itself becomes.
Fraud has begun to deform the people who practised it.
The First Ditch — Seducers and Panderers
The first ditch of Malebolge begins with movement.
Here the seducers and panderers are forced into lines, endlessly marching in opposite directions while demons stand over them, beating them with whips and driving them onwards.
I wanted this first punishment to immediately establish that Circle Eight operates differently. There is no rest and nowhere to hide. The figures are reduced to part of a procession, pushed around the ditch again and again beneath the control of the demons.
There is a particular cruelty in Dante's choice of punishment.
These are people who, in life, manipulated the desires of others for their own purposes. Some used people for their own sexual gratification; others acted as intermediaries, exploiting or procuring people for somebody else. They directed, persuaded and controlled.
Now they are the ones being directed.
The seducers who once led others where they wanted them to go are themselves driven forward by force.
That reversal was what interested me most when painting the scene. The demons aren't merely there to make Hell look frightening. Their whips complete the idea. Control has changed hands.
And this is only the first ditch.
Dante has barely entered the world of fraud, and already the punishment is beginning to imitate the crime.
The Second Ditch — The Flatterers
If the first ditch is about manipulation through desire, the second is about manipulation through words.
Here Dante places the flatterers.
And he puts them in shit.
There really is no elegant way of putting it — and I don't think there should be.
The souls are submerged in a ditch filled with human excrement, filthy and almost indistinguishable from the waste surrounding them. Dante's punishment is wonderfully direct: in life these people produced false praise, telling others what they wanted to hear for their own advantage. Their words sounded pleasant, but underneath they were worthless.
So Dante reveals those words for what he believes them to be.
Shit.
That bluntness is exactly what I wanted to retain in my painting. There is no need to make the symbolism complicated. These figures aren't surrounded by something beautiful that conceals corruption. They are physically immersed in the filth their dishonesty represents.
It also takes Circle Eight another step downward.
The seducers and panderers are still recognisably people moving through a landscape. Here, human dignity begins to disappear. The souls are reduced to heads and bodies wallowing in waste.
And Dante is only getting started.
The Third Ditch — The Simonists
The third ditch turns Dante’s attention towards corruption within the Church.
Here are the Simonists — those who bought or sold sacred offices, privileges and positions for money. Dante saw this as a particularly ugly kind of fraud because something supposedly spiritual had been turned into a commodity.
I represented them buried head-first inside holes, with only their legs and feet sticking out above the ground.
It is a wonderfully strange image from Dante, but there is meaning behind it.
The position grotesquely reverses the ceremony of baptism. Instead of being brought upright into a new spiritual life, these figures have been thrust upside down into the earth. Their bodies disappear into holes while their feet remain exposed above them.
And those feet burn.
Dante describes flames playing across the soles of the sinners, with the severity of the burning reflecting their guilt. The result is almost absurd to look at — rows of disembodied legs kicking out of the ground — yet the punishment underneath it is vicious.
I liked that contradiction.
At first you see legs sticking out of holes and have to wonder what on earth is happening. Then the meaning becomes darker.
These were people who, in Dante’s eyes, had taken something sacred and inverted its purpose. So in Hell, they themselves are inverted.
And Dante doesn't keep his criticism safely in the distant past. Among the condemned he encounters Pope Nicholas III, and through him Dante launches one of his fiercest attacks on corruption, wealth and power within the medieval Church.
This is where Circle Eight becomes particularly interesting to me.
Fraud is no longer only something committed by obvious villains. Dante is beginning to point towards institutions and people who were supposed to represent morality themselves.
The robes, titles and positions mean nothing down here.
All we see are the burning feet.
The Fourth Ditch — The Diviners
The fourth ditch is one of Dante’s most visually brutal reversals.
Here are the diviners, astrologers, fortune-tellers and false prophets — people who claimed that they could look ahead and see what was coming.
So Dante makes sure that they can never look forward again.
Their heads have been violently twisted around on their bodies so that their faces look backwards. They are forced to walk forwards through Hell while only being able to see what lies behind them.
This is the scene I painted with the figures whose heads are turned completely the opposite way.
It is such a simple idea that it barely needs explaining.
They wanted to see too far ahead.
Now they can only look back.
But there is another detail in Dante's description that makes the punishment even more disturbing. As they walk, their tears run down their faces and, because their heads have been reversed, the tears fall down their backs and between their buttocks.
Even Dante is horrified by what he sees.
He begins to weep for them, but Virgil rebukes him. This is Hell; Virgil tells him that pity for those receiving divine judgement is itself misplaced.
That moment interested me because it interrupts the spectacle of the punishment. However grotesque these figures have become, Dante still recognises the human being inside them.
In my painting, the physical distortion does most of the storytelling. I didn't need to invent another monster or elaborate torture device.
The human body itself has become the punishment.
A head facing the wrong direction says everything:
You spent your life trying to see what lay ahead. Now, for eternity, you will never see where you are going.
The Fifth Ditch — The Barrators
The fifth ditch deals with another form of corruption: barratry — politicians and public officials who sold their influence, accepted bribes or abused public office for private gain.
Dante plunges them into a lake of boiling pitch.
It is a particularly clever punishment because the pitch hides them from sight. In life, their corruption was conducted beneath the surface — secret deals, concealed payments and dishonest exchanges — so in Hell they are submerged beneath something black, sticky and impossible to see through.
Whenever one of the sinners tries to rise out of it, the demons are waiting.
These are the Malebranche, a wonderfully vicious gang of demons armed with hooks and weapons. They patrol the edge of the pitch, tormenting anyone who attempts to escape and forcing them back beneath the surface.
There is something almost chaotic about this part of Dante's journey. The demons aren't solemn guardians of Hell. They are grotesque, violent and sometimes ridiculous. They argue, threaten, trick and attack, and for a moment the journey itself begins to feel dangerously out of control.
That was something I wanted in this section of the painting too.
By now Circle Eight is becoming crowded with bodies, demons and punishments. There is less and less visual breathing room as Dante and Virgil descend.
But beneath all that chaos is another beautifully simple piece of Dante's logic:
Corruption that was hidden in life remains hidden in Hell.
Only now, whenever it tries to surface, something is waiting with a hook to drag it back down.
The Sixth Ditch — The Hypocrites
The sixth ditch is the punishment of the hypocrites, and this was another of Dante’s punishments that I found brilliantly simple in its symbolism.
The figures appear to be wearing magnificent cloaks. They look rich, impressive and important, almost golden from the outside.
But the appearance is a lie.
The cloaks are lined with lead and impossibly heavy.
The hypocrites are condemned to walk beneath their weight for eternity, slowly dragging themselves around the ditch. What appeared impressive on the surface has become an unbearable burden underneath.
That is hypocrisy made physical.
What you show the world on the outside is not necessarily what exists within.
Among them I painted one figure very differently.
He is Caiaphas, the high priest associated in the Gospel account with the decision that it was expedient for one man to die for the people. Dante gives him a particularly symbolic punishment.
He is stretched spread-eagled across the ground, crucified in place.
Rather than being allowed to join the procession, Caiaphas must lie across its path while the other hypocrites pass over him. The man whose counsel helped place Christ upon the cross is now himself made into something resembling a human cross.
In my painting I surrounded this part of the ditch with the demonic figures, making the scene feel threatening and oppressive, but it is the contrast between the two punishments that interested me most.
One is about appearance — the beautiful cloak concealing its terrible weight.
The other is about consequence — Caiaphas physically bearing the burden of what he helped bring about.
Circle Eight keeps returning to the same uncomfortable idea.
Fraud depends upon a difference between what something appears to be and what it really is.
In the sixth ditch, Dante quite literally makes his sinners carry that difference on their backs.
The Seventh Ditch — The Thieves
The seventh ditch belongs to the thieves, but Dante does something far more interesting with them than simply punishing people for stealing.
He begins to take away the one thing they believed belonged entirely to them.
Their own bodies.
This is the section I painted filled with serpents, with the strange centaur-like creature above and figures below beginning to transform into grotesque reptilian forms.
The thieves are surrounded and attacked by snakes. Their hands are bound by serpents, their bodies are bitten, and then the punishment becomes increasingly bizarre. Human beings and reptiles begin to merge, exchange forms and transform into one another.
One sinner is bitten and consumed by fire before collapsing into ash, only to reform again. Elsewhere, a serpent and a man seem almost to melt into each other as their anatomies change. Limbs alter, faces distort and the distinction between human and animal begins to disappear.
That transformation fascinated me, and I wanted it visible in the painting. Two of my figures are caught partway through the process, becoming those strange lizard-like creatures, while snakes twist around the feet and bodies of the others.
Above them is the extraordinary Cacus, the monstrous centaur Dante encounters here, with a dragon upon his back.
But underneath all the spectacle is a very clever punishment.
A thief takes something that belongs to somebody else.
So Dante creates a place where nothing can truly belong to you — not even your own identity.
Your body can be stolen.
Your shape can be taken from you.
You can become something else while something else takes your form.
It turns theft into something much bigger than the loss of possessions. Dante makes the thieves experience the violation at the heart of stealing: the destruction of the boundary between what is mine and what is yours.
And visually, this is where my Circle Eight really begins to mutate.
The human figures we've followed down through Hell are no longer simply being punished.
They are beginning to lose their human form altogether.
The Eighth Ditch — The Fraudulent Counsellors
The eighth ditch is dominated by fire.
At first, what Dante sees looks almost beautiful: countless flames moving through the darkness. But each flame contains a soul.
These are the fraudulent counsellors — people who used their intelligence, influence and powers of persuasion to deceive others or lead them towards dishonest ends.
I painted this ditch as fire, because here Dante almost removes the human figure from view altogether.
The sinners are completely enclosed within individual flames.
There is something particularly interesting about that. Throughout Circle Eight we have watched the human body being humiliated and distorted — buried upside down, twisted backwards, submerged, crushed beneath heavy cloaks and transformed by serpents.
Here, the body effectively disappears.
Only the flame remains.
Among the most important figures Dante encounters is Ulysses — Odysseus — who shares a double flame with Diomedes. Dante reimagines Ulysses beyond the story told by Homer and gives him a final voyage driven by an overwhelming hunger for knowledge and experience.
Ulysses persuades his ageing companions to sail beyond the limits traditionally imposed upon human exploration. His words are magnificent and inspiring — but those words also lead the men who trusted him towards their deaths.
That makes this ditch more complicated than simple lying.
The danger can lie in brilliance itself.
Intelligence, eloquence and the ability to persuade are extraordinary human gifts. But in Malebolge, Dante repeatedly asks what happens when our gifts are turned towards manipulation.
The tongue that once persuaded others is now hidden inside a flame.
And that is how the souls speak. Dante cannot simply see the person talking. The fire itself seems to become their voice, flickering and moving as the words emerge.
For my painting, I didn't want to overcomplicate this ditch.
After all the bodies, snakes, demons and transformations surrounding it, fire was enough.
A field of flames containing people we can no longer properly see.
Because by the eighth ditch, fraud has almost succeeded in doing something far more frightening than physically torturing the human body.
It has begun to erase the person inside it.
The Ninth Ditch — The Sowers of Discord
The ninth ditch is one of the most physically brutal parts of Malebolge.
Here Dante places the sowers of discord — people who, through their words and actions, divided others. They created conflict between families, communities, religions and political groups.
So Dante makes division itself their punishment.
Their bodies are cut apart.
A demon armed with a sword repeatedly hacks and mutilates the souls as they pass. Bodies are split open, limbs severed, faces slashed and wounds opened so violently that Dante describes entrails spilling from the body.
But the punishment doesn't end with the cutting.
As the souls continue around the ditch, their wounds heal.
By the time they return to the demon, their bodies have become whole again.
And so they are cut apart again.
That is the scene I painted as the circle of people being flayed and mutilated, returning whole only to undergo the same torment again. The circular movement was important because this isn't a single act of violence. It is an endless cycle: division, healing, division again.
The symbolism is mercilessly literal.
Those who divided others are themselves divided.
One of the most memorable figures Dante encounters here is Bertran de Born, who Dante believed had helped create division between King Henry II and his son. His punishment takes the idea even further: his head has been severed from his body, and he carries it before him like a lantern.
The person has literally become divided from himself.
This ditch also contains some of Dante's most controversial figures, including Muhammad and Ali, whom Dante, writing from the religious assumptions and conflicts of medieval Christian Europe, places among the sowers of religious division. That part of the poem tells us something important about Dante's own historical world and perspective; it should not simply be treated as an objective judgement on Islam or those figures.
When I painted the ninth ditch, though, what interested me was the broader visual idea Dante had created.
Division creates division.
A person who tears people apart is torn apart.
And because the wounds heal before being opened again, the punishment becomes a horrible metaphor for something recognisably human too: we can repair divisions, only to create them all over again.
In this ditch, Dante turns that cycle into flesh.
The Tenth Ditch — The Falsifiers
The final ditch of Malebolge belongs to the falsifiers.
After all the demons, flames, serpents and mutilation of the previous ditches, Dante ends Circle Eight with something different.
Disease.
This is the scene I painted with the bodies covered in sores and boils, their flesh diseased and corrupted.
Dante groups together different kinds of falsification here: alchemists who falsified substances, counterfeiters who falsified money, impersonators who falsified identity, and liars who falsified the truth.
Their crimes are different, but they share the same basic act.
They took something real and corrupted it into something false.
So Dante corrupts their bodies.
The souls are afflicted with terrible diseases. Their skin is covered in scabs and sores. Some claw desperately at themselves, scratching so violently that their nails tear at their diseased flesh. Others are swollen, feverish, maddened by thirst or driven into insanity.
The human body has become almost like a counterfeit version of itself.
That is what I wanted to capture with the sores and boils in my painting. By this point I didn't need another complicated mechanism of torture. The corruption is now coming from inside the body itself.
And I think it makes an appropriate ending to Circle Eight.
We entered Malebolge with Geryon, a creature whose pleasant human face concealed something monstrous behind it. That was our first warning about the nature of fraud: what we see and what something really is are not necessarily the same thing.
Then Dante took us through ten different versions of that idea.
People manipulated desire, corrupted language, sold the sacred, pretended to see the future, sold public office, concealed themselves beneath appearances, stole what belonged to others, misused intelligence, divided people and finally falsified reality itself.
And now, at the very bottom of Malebolge, even the human body appears corrupted.
There is nowhere else for fraud to go.
Beyond this point lies something colder.
Dante and Virgil are about to descend into the Ninth and final Circle of Hell.
Chapter Four: Leaving Malebolge — Towards the Final Circle
With the tenth ditch behind them, Dante and Virgil have reached the bottom of the Eighth Circle.
But Hell is not finished with them yet.
Ahead lies the Ninth and final circle, and before they can reach it Dante begins to see enormous shapes rising through the darkness.
At first he cannot understand what he is looking at. They appear almost like the towers of a distant city.
They are not towers.
They are giants.
These enormous figures stand around the great pit that separates Malebolge from the frozen world below. Among them is Nimrod, associated by Dante with the Tower of Babel, his speech reduced to incomprehensible sounds. Nearby are other giants from classical mythology, including the chained Ephialtes.
But one giant is able to help them.
Antaeus.
Virgil persuades him to lift the two travellers in his enormous hands. He picks them up and slowly lowers them over the edge of the abyss.
It is another extraordinary change of scale.
After the claustrophobic ditches of Circle Eight — packed with bodies, demons, serpents, fire, filth and disease — Dante suddenly makes the human figures feel tiny.
And below them, Hell changes again.
The flames disappear.
The boiling pitch is gone.
There is no roaring furnace waiting at the centre of Hell.
There is ice.
Dante and Virgil are being lowered into Cocytus, the frozen lake of the Ninth Circle, where the traitors are trapped.
And at its very centre waits Lucifer.
The Ninth Circle — Treachery
The final circle of Hell is not burning.
It is frozen.
I found that fascinating.
After everything Dante has shown us — fire, boiling blood, burning tombs, demons, mutilation and torture — the very bottom of Hell is not hotter.
It is colder.
Dante and Virgil arrive at Cocytus, an enormous frozen lake containing those guilty of treachery. The souls are trapped within the ice at different depths, some with only their heads exposed, others completely imprisoned beneath its surface.
And I think the cold is important.
Treachery requires something that the violence of the earlier circles doesn't necessarily require. You have to betray trust. There has to be some relationship, bond or obligation there in the first place for it to be betrayed.
The warmth of human connection has disappeared.
What remains is cold.
Four Ways to Betray
Dante divides the frozen lake into four regions, each representing a different kind of treachery.
Caina contains those who betrayed their relatives and takes its name from Cain, who killed his brother Abel.
Antenora contains those who betrayed their country or political cause.
Ptolomea is for those who betrayed their guests — people who violated one of the most basic obligations of hospitality and protection.
And finally comes Judecca, named after Judas Iscariot.
Here are those who betrayed their masters and benefactors.
The closer Dante moves towards the centre, the more completely the souls disappear beneath the ice.
Until eventually there is almost nothing human left to see.
And then, at the absolute centre of Hell, Dante finally reaches the figure towards whom this entire journey has been descending.
Lucifer.
This was the destination.
But Dante's Devil isn't quite what I expected.
And that was what made him so interesting to paint.
Chapter Five — Lucifer — The Prisoner at the Centre of Hell
At the very centre of my Hell is Lucifer.
And I didn't want him sitting on a throne.
That isn't what Dante gives us.
After everything we have travelled through to reach him, we might expect the Devil to be the great ruler of Hell, commanding the demons and presiding over his kingdom.
Instead, Lucifer is a prisoner.
I painted him enormous, filling almost the entire space. Dante and Virgil are tiny beside him, surrounded by the broken landscape of ice. I wanted that difference in scale to be immediate. This creature appears overwhelmingly powerful.
But look again.
He cannot go anywhere.
Lucifer is trapped in the frozen lake of Cocytus at the very bottom of Hell.
Three Faces. Three Betrayals.
Dante describes Lucifer with three faces upon a single head, and I painted all three of them.
Each face has a mouth.
And each mouth contains a traitor.
In the central mouth is Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. In the other two are Brutus and Cassius, whom Dante condemns for their betrayal of Julius Caesar.
Lucifer chews them continuously.
I made that punishment deliberately bloody. The three mouths are not symbolic little additions tucked discreetly into the painting. I wanted you to see what is happening.
These men are being consumed.
Again and again.
At the lowest point of Dante's universe, betrayal has literally become something that devours.
The Wings That Keep Him Imprisoned
Then there are Lucifer's wings.
I made them enormous.
They spread across almost the entire composition, more like the wings of a gigantic bat than those of an angel. Their size makes Lucifer appear even more formidable.
Yet they contain one of my favourite contradictions in Dante's Hell.
Lucifer beats his wings desperately.
But the wind they create is so cold that it freezes Cocytus around him.
The harder those magnificent wings beat, the more they contribute to the frozen world that imprisons him.
His apparent power has become part of his captivity.
I love that.
Because suddenly Lucifer stops being simply the monster waiting at the bottom of Hell.
He becomes something much more interesting.
He is trapped by the consequences of what he is.
The Devil Doesn't Rule Hell
That changed the way I saw this final image.
Lucifer may be gigantic. He may be terrifying. He may sit at the absolute centre of this entire infernal landscape.
But he hasn't won anything.
He doesn't rule Hell. He is serving the greatest sentence in it.
The tiny figures beside him are actually more powerful in one crucial respect.
They can leave.
Lucifer cannot.
Dante and Virgil have travelled through lust, gluttony, greed, wrath, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery. They have watched human beings surrender themselves to appetite, anger, power, deception and betrayal.
Now, at the destination towards which everything has been descending, they find the ultimate consequence.
Not freedom.
Not power.
Not even fire.
Isolation.
Lucifer is enormous, but completely alone.
And Then Dante Turns Everything Upside Down
There is one final piece of genius in Dante's journey.
To escape Hell, Dante and Virgil don't turn around.
They keep going.
Virgil climbs directly onto Lucifer's enormous body, with Dante clinging to him, and begins descending through his fur towards the very centre of the Earth.
Then something extraordinary happens.
Virgil suddenly turns himself around.
What Dante thought was down has become up.
They have passed the centre of gravity.
Lucifer's body has effectively become the ladder by which they escape the Hell at whose centre he is imprisoned.
I find that wonderfully ironic.
The Devil himself becomes part of the route out.
They climb away through a narrow passage towards the opposite hemisphere, leaving Lucifer frozen behind them.
And after an entire journey conducted beneath the earth, through darkness, blood, fire, filth, violence and ice, Dante ends Inferno with something incredibly simple.
They emerge from the darkness.
And once again, they can see the stars.
For me, that is where this journey through Hell was always heading.
Not towards Lucifer.
Past him.
Epilogue — Out of Hell
When I began Dante's Inferno, I don't think I fully appreciated what I had taken on.
This is an incredibly difficult book.
Reading it is one thing. Understanding it well enough to turn it into a work of art is quite another.
It took me months of hard work just to unravel what Dante was doing. I had to understand the structure of Hell, the people he placed within it, the politics and history behind them, the mythology, the biblical references and, perhaps most importantly, why each punishment took the form that it did.
Then I had to somehow turn all of that into one mammoth sculpture.
I wasn't interested in producing a collection of illustrations from the poem. I needed the whole thing to work as one journey, so that you could begin with Dante lost in the dark wood and physically follow him down through Hell, circle after circle, until eventually you reached Lucifer.
That was considerably easier to imagine than it was to make.
Building My Own Inferno
The deeper I went into the book, the more I realised that Inferno isn't really about monsters.
It is about us.
Dante takes human behaviour and makes it physical. Desire, excess, greed, anger, violence, deception and betrayal become landscapes, creatures and punishments.
Again and again, the punishment reflects the behaviour that brought the person there.
The wrathful remain consumed by anger. The thieves eventually lose possession of their own bodies. Those who divided people are themselves divided. The fraudulent become surrounded by deception and corruption. Finally, Lucifer beats the enormous wings that help freeze the lake imprisoning him.
That idea fascinated me.
We can become trapped by the very things we create.
And although Dante's world is medieval, that certainly isn't.
Dante's Hell — Through My Eyes
I wasn't trying to produce an archaeological reconstruction of Dante's Hell.
This is his imagination travelling through mine.
There were moments when I had to make decisions Dante couldn't make for me. A literary journey doesn't automatically become a successful visual composition. Something can make perfect sense on a page and become confusing when you try to place hundreds of interconnected stories into one physical artwork.
In fact, even after the sculpture was finished, it wasn't quite finished.
When the work eventually came back to Wales, I added to Hell.
Looking at it again, I felt parts of the journey needed greater structure. The narrative wasn't reading as clearly as I wanted it to, so I returned to the work and developed it further.
Sometimes that happens.
Finishing the making of something doesn't necessarily mean I have finished understanding what I've made.
And if the story isn't reading properly, I will go back in.
There Could Have Been More...
I actually had it in my mind to continue.
Dante's Divine Comedy doesn't end with Inferno. There are still Purgatorio and Paradiso, and for a while I imagined creating the two together as another single work.
Purgatorio offered me the stronger visual narrative, while Paradiso presented a completely different problem. I didn't really see Paradise as another painting. In my head, it wanted to become sculpture — something more physical, perhaps something built around space and light rather than another densely populated painted world.
I still haven't made it.
The practical explanation is fairly straightforward.
I haven't got the bloody space.
And perhaps there is another reason.
Of the three books, Inferno was the one that really grabbed me.
For an artist like me, Dante had rather inconveniently put most of the best material in Hell.
The Stars
After spending months trying to understand this book and considerably longer turning it into an artwork, perhaps the thing I like most is that Dante doesn't actually end Inferno with Lucifer.
Lucifer isn't the destination.
Dante and Virgil go past him.
They climb down his body, cross the centre of the Earth and suddenly discover that what had been down has become up.
Then they climb.
After everything we have travelled through — the lust, greed, violence, blood, demons, fire, fraud, mutilation, disease and finally the frozen centre of Hell — two tiny human beings leave it all behind.
Eventually they emerge beneath the night sky.
And Dante gives us the stars.
I think that matters.
The journey began with a man who had lost his way in a dark wood. It ends with that same man having travelled through the worst that Dante could imagine human beings capable of becoming.
But he doesn't remain there.
That may be the most important part of the whole journey.
You can go into Hell.
You can understand Hell.
You can even recognise pieces of it in ourselves.
But you don't have to stay there.
After all those months of research, all those characters, punishments, demons and monsters, and after building this enormous journey down into the centre of the Earth, perhaps it is fitting that the final thing Dante leaves me with isn't an image of Hell at all.
It is an image of escape.
Two tiny figures coming out of the darkness.
And seeing the stars again.
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