A detail from Sandro Botticelli's "The Chart of Hell" (Wikimedia Commons) In the beginning, it was a project to illustrate all 100 cantos of what is arguably the greatest of all European poems. Then ...

Sandro Botticelli, “Beatrice explains to Dante the order of the cosmos (Divine Comedy, Paradiso II)” (circa 1481–1495), pen and brown ink over metal pen on parchment, 32.4 x 47.4 cm (© Staatliche ...

Read our latest issue or browse back issues. The sweeping panorama Luzzi unfolds stretches from the 14th century to the present day, from the workshops of Florence, where art was made, to the bunkers ...

Some things in the history of literature seem too good to be true: Alexander Pope’s translations of Homer, Henri Matisse’s illustrations of “Ulysses.” Among the most surprising are the illustrations ...

When telling a story, history’s imperfect record sometimes insists upon inconvenient gaps. This is the case with Botticelli’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy, a remarkable tale that spans ...

Max Norman laments that Joseph Luzzi’s new book “Botticelli’s Secret” focuses on the history of Botticelli’s long-forgotten illustrations of “The Divine Comedy,” not on the illustrations themselves ...

Sandro Botticelli’s painting Saint Augustine in his Study is part of the exhibit “Botticelli and the Search for the Divine” that opened at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia, and ...