Alberto Martini (1876 - 1954)

 Italian painter and illustrator Alberto Martini's work has been described as ranging from "elegant and epic" to "grotesque and macabre."  Many consider him one of the precursors of Surrealism, a technique which features the element of surprise and non sequitur. Martini’s abstract interpretation  of Dante’s Divine Comedy possesses a sense of fantasy.

We left him behind when I took note

of two souls so frozen in a single hole

the head of one served as the other's hat.

As a famished man will bite into his bread,

 the one above had set his teeth into the other

just where the brain's stem leaves the spinal cord.

Tydeus gnawed the temples of  Melanippus

with bitter hatred just as he was doing

to the skull and to the other parts.

Canto XXXII 124 - 132, The Inferno







This black and white sketch of Count Ugolino gnawing on Archbishop Ruggieri's head supports the theme of cannibalism, a common motif throughout Inferno. Count Ugolino's head and upper torso protrude above a sea of ice and eclipse the black backdrop that frames him. One instantly gets the feeling of being in a cold, dark place. Dante and Virgil are absent from the picture, forcing the viewer to experience this grotesque scene on his/her own.

 Despite his perpetual feast, the Count looks emaciated, as evidenced by the folds of wrinkled skin sagging around the hollows of his cheeks and the bony angle formed at the summit of his scrawny collar bone and arm. The receding gums of his huge teeth, locked onto the back of the archbishop's neck, hint of a bad case of gingivitis and compliment the maniacal stare which is as fixed in his eyes as the frozen straw-like strands of hair jutting from his head. 

The Archbishop looks strangely complacent; his right eye lacks color, indicating either a cataract condition or a state of decomposition. Upon closer inspection, we realize that he is buried up to his shoulders in ice - rendered immobile, so perhaps resolve is the word which more accurately describes the tortured look on his face. If we look even closer, we might conclude that we are looking at a bodiless head wearing what was probably his dying expression - an optical illusion demonstrating Martini working in concert with Dante's brilliant flair for the spoken word as he interprets the allegorical "Tydeus gnawed the temples of  Melanippus with bitter hatred." (Warrior Tydeus munched on the skull of his enemy, Melanippus much like Ugolino dines on Archbishop Ruggieri.) 

The buried castle in Pisa represents the archbishop's imprisonment of Ugolino and his sons. He denied them food, and when the sons died, Ugolino, in his hunger, was driven to eat the flesh of their corpses. How fitting that the castle is situated right beneath the archbishop where he is forced to look at it and remember...for eternity.

Works Cited:

http://www.openculture.com/2013/11/alberto-martinis-shocking-illustrations-of-dantes-divine-comedy-1901-1944.html

Robert Hollander Dante Inferno. 2nd ed. New York: Randon, 2000. Print.