Dante and Virgil is an 1850 oil on canvas painting by the French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The painting depicts a scene from Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’, which narrates a journey through Hell by the main character – Dante – and his guide, Virgil.
This painting was inspired by a short scene from the Inferno, set in the eighth circle of Hell (the circle for falsifiers and counterfeiters), where Dante, accompanied by Virgil, watches a fight between two damned souls: Capocchio, a heretic and alchemist is attacked and bitten on the neck by Gianni Schicchi who had usurped the identity of a dead man in order to fraudulently claim his inheritance.
After failing to secure the first prize in the challenge its creator had set his eyes on It depicts themes that Bouguereau would never revisit again after failing to secure the first prize in the challenge he had set his eyes on.
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