ABSTRACT

Dante Alighieri's Francesca was constantly on view amid the storms and stresses of European Romanticism. A highly influential image of the Boccaccian scene in which Dante's lovers are observed had appeared in the sequence of 110 drawings to illustrate the Commedia by the English artist John Flaxman. The Salon painting that established his reputation was the famous Gericault-like Barque de Dante of 1822, illustrating the voyage over the Styx in Inferno VIII. Dante was to be promoted by Victor Hugo in his Preface to Cromwell as an artist 'who had understood that the sublime in life and art necessarily entailed the grotesque'. By 1882, Sir Joseph Noel Paton had become highly successful as a painter, in the Pre-Raphaelite style, of a wide range of medieval, literary and religious subjects. Amongst his early ventures in this style was an oil painting titled Dante Meditating.