Lucifer in Inferno XXXIV

Lucifer in Inferno XXXIV

Lucifer fills this tall sheet from the tips of his wings to his clawed feet. His three faces and shaggy body are frightening enough, but Botticelli has also made him part of a route. Tiny Dante and Virgil appear beside him more than once, climbing down and then moving away. Their journey through Hell ends by passing the creature fixed at its centre. The image belongs to Botticelli's illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy, and the Berlin museum identifies it as the second of his two drawings for Inferno XXXIV.^[1][2]

That distinction is essential. The first sheet shows Satan half encased in the frozen lake of Cocytus. Here, on Inferno XXXIV (2), Botticelli gives him a full body and follows the travelers beyond the deepest point. The Kupferstichkabinett's inventory number is Botticelli, Inferno 34,2. The work is not simply a portrait of the devil: it is a visual account of the moment when “down” unexpectedly becomes “up.”^[1][2]

Contents

1. A Giant at the End of Hell
2. The Descent Becomes an Ascent
3. Two Pieces of Parchment, One Turning Point
4. A Later Dante Illustrator and an Open Question
5. From Hell Toward Purgatory

The Berlin record gives these object details and marks its photograph Public Domain Mark 1.0. It also notes a horizontal fold and two joined pieces of parchment. The join can be seen across the image near Lucifer's lower torso; it is part of the object's physical history, not a modern line added to illustrate the path.^[1]

A Giant at the End of Hell

Botticelli makes scale the first encounter. Lucifer's body dominates the page while the travelers, repeated to his right, are small enough to miss at a glance. His feet nearly reach the bottom edge. Spread wings take up the upper corners, and the heads cluster above broad shoulders and hands. The surrounding parchment is comparatively open, so the huge figure appears exposed rather than enclosed within a crowded landscape.^[1]

The three faces are described in Dante's canto, as are the batlike wings. In the poem, the beating wings make the wind that freezes the lake, and Judas, Brutus and Cassius are held in the three mouths. Princeton's canto summary places these details before Virgil begins the descent. Botticelli's line work brings the central monster into view, though some small features are easier to follow in the museum's high-resolution image than in a reduced page reproduction.^[1][3]

Much of the giant is covered in carefully repeated curls and strands. This surface matters to the action, because Virgil uses Lucifer's hair as a way down. The monster's body is therefore both the last terrifying sight in the Inferno and the ladder by which the two travelers escape it. Botticelli turns a poetic paradox into a readable physical movement.^[1][2][3]

Look at the contrast between the giant's heavy, planted feet and the travelers' small, shifting positions. Lucifer cannot leave the centre; Dante and Virgil can. Their mobility makes the sheet a narrative rather than a static emblem of evil. The difference in scale helps explain why Virgil must carry Dante and find a grip in the creature's fur.^[1][2]

The Descent Becomes an Ascent

At the Earth's centre, Dante's sense of direction fails him. In the poem Virgil turns around, and the movement that seemed to lead farther downward becomes a climb. Dante is confused before his guide explains that they have passed the midpoint. Princeton's summary separates the climb along Lucifer, the turn and the route toward the opposite hemisphere. Berlin's own account says Botticelli rotates the little figures through 180 degrees to make that reversal visible.^[1][2][3]

That reversal is more than a clever change in the travellers' posture. The Leeds Centre for Dante Studies explains Virgil's account of the Earth's shape: Lucifer fell through the southern hemisphere, land retreated to the north, and displaced ground rose into the mountain of Purgatory. After passing the centre, the travellers are moving towards that mountain through a narrow passage. Botticelli does not draw a complete globe, a labelled hemisphere or the mountain itself on this sheet. Instead, the turning figures and the open space beyond Lucifer give a small, local sign of the much larger geography that Virgil describes. Text and image do different work: the canto explains why the route exists; the repeated little bodies make the reversal visible.^[3][5]

The small pairs at the right of the drawing ask for slow reading. One appears near the upper body, another farther down, and still another lies near the lower right. They do not represent several different journeys. Botticelli places successive moments of one journey on the same sheet, as he does elsewhere in the Dante cycle. By tracking the little travelers against Lucifer's body, the viewer follows a route through an otherwise baffling change of orientation.^[1][2]

Herbert Horne counted eight successive groups of the two travelers in this larger Lucifer drawing. He starts with Dante shrinking behind Virgil in the wind, follows them down Lucifer's shaggy side, and then finds them emerging through rock after Virgil has turned at the creature's haunch. The number is useful as a looking aid, not a requirement to perceive eight equally dark pairs in every reproduction: some marks are slight. More important is the pattern of change. The group that first recoils from Lucifer and the group that climbs away have crossed the same vast body, so repeated figures make Dante's spatial confusion and subsequent escape part of the drawing's structure.^[4]

A broad circle around the giant's lower half helps hold the composition together. It suggests the central geometry of the passage rather than a separate episode of punishment. The drawing's light metalpoint and brown pen can make this shape appear faint in a small reproduction; the full museum image lets the viewer distinguish it from the curls of hair and the horizontal join.^[1]

Berlin's object description adds a striking viewing instruction: the spectator, like Dante, must turn the leaf to experience Lucifer inverted at the gravitational centre. The page itself makes the turning of the travelers' world a physical problem for the reader. This claim comes from the museum's interpretation of the object; it is not necessary to presume exactly how Botticelli originally intended every sheet to be bound. The record cautions that the reconstructed book arrangement is uncertain.^[1]

The page also tests what a viewer can and cannot learn from a single image. Dante reports that Lucifer's wingbeats freeze Cocytus, and that the three mouths punish Judas, Brutus and Cassius. Those details belong especially to the first Inferno XXXIV drawing, where the upper body and ice are the focus. On this second sheet, the full length of Lucifer and the figures moving beside him give priority to the exit. Reading the drawings together therefore follows the canto from encounter and punishment to a route out of Hell. This is a comparison of the surviving compositions, not evidence that Botticelli specified an exact viewing order for a completed bound volume.^[1][2][3][5]

Two Pieces of Parchment, One Turning Point

Most illustrations in Botticelli's Dante cycle occupy one wide sheet. Berlin's account calls this image a double page made from two pieces of parchment joined together. The unusually tall field suits the entire body of Lucifer and the long downward path beside him. A horizontal line across the page records where the pieces meet. The construction gives this final Inferno scene more vertical space than a standard canto sheet.^[1][2]

The museum says the two pieces were folded horizontally and could be opened out in the surviving binding. Yet it also questions whether that arrangement reflects Botticelli's first plan. We can describe the joined sheets and the visible fold without treating a later reconstruction as a settled original design. That limit is useful: the picture's physical drama is evident even while its first book format remains debated.^[1]

The existence of two Inferno XXXIV drawings can also confuse a search for “Botticelli's Lucifer.” Berlin's first sheet presents the devil half embedded in the ice, with the three punished traitors. This second sheet extends the visual argument through the entire figure and the travelers' departure. They are related but distinct objects, with different dates and inventory identifiers in the museum catalogue.^[1][2]

A Later Dante Illustrator and an Open Question

Federico Zuccari made another extensive drawn Divine Comedy cycle in Spain in 1586–88; the Uffizi now holds its 88 sheets and catalogues an image of Lucifer across Inferno XXXII–XXXIV. That establishes a later artist working on the same poem, not a direct line of copying from Botticelli. In the commentary to Botticelli's 1896 facsimile, Friedrich Lippmann argued that Zuccari's gigantic Satan showed especially close dependence on Botticelli's conception. A near-contemporary response by Ludwig Volkmann disputed the inference: similarities might arise from Dante's own description and earlier image traditions, while Zuccari's settings and manner differed substantially. Without a documented occasion on which Zuccari saw Botticelli's sheet or a more decisive comparison, influence remains a scholarly proposal. The disagreement is useful because it separates the fame of this Lucifer drawing from proof of how a later painter designed his own.^[6][7][8]

From Hell Toward Purgatory

The drawing does not end with Lucifer's face. After the travelers pass him, the poem leads them through a passage toward the surface of the southern hemisphere. There lies the mountain of Purgatory, the setting of the Commedia's next part. Berlin's institutional story explicitly links this sheet to that transition. The page's faint small figures and open lower ground turn a terrifying centre into a threshold.^[2][3]

This is why the full-frame image matters. Cropping to the three faces would make a vivid monster portrait but would remove the joined lower sheet, the inverted travelers and the feet. Botticelli wants the viewer to keep the whole strange vertical route in sight. The object is about crossing a point in space and in the poem, not just encountering evil at close range.^[1][2]

Begin at Lucifer's heads, then look for Dante and Virgil along his right side. Follow their changing orientation down the hairy body and beyond the circle. What first seems like an image of being trapped at the bottom of Hell becomes an image of passage. Botticelli makes the way out visible inside the very figure that blocks it.^[1][2][3]

References

1. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, “La Divina Commedia, Inferno XXXIV (2): Lucifer in Full Form; Farewell to the Inferno,” inv. Botticelli, Inferno 34,2, current collection record updated 12 August 2026, accessed 29 September 2026 View source.
2. Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, “Botticelli Featuring Dante,” institutional exhibition story, sections on Inferno XXXIV (1) and (2), accessed 29 September 2026 View source.
3. Princeton Dante Project, “Summary of Inferno XXXIV,” canto summary, accessed 29 September 2026 View source.
4. Herbert P. Horne, Alessandro Filipepi, Commonly Called Sandro Botticelli (1908), pp. 212–13 (PDF pp. 362–63), distinguishing the two Lucifer drawings and tracing eight traveler groups on the larger one; consulted 1 October 2026 View source.
5. Leeds Centre for Dante Studies and University of Notre Dame, “Cocytus (Cantos XXXI–XXXIV)”, reading of Inferno XXXIV's punishments, gravitational turn, hemispheres and Purgatory mountain; consulted 1 October 2026 View source.
6. Friedrich Lippmann, The Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante's Divina Commedia (1896), introduction printed p. 23 (PDF p. 35) proposing Zuccari's dependence, and Inferno XXXIV entry printed p. 50 (PDF p. 62); original edition consulted 1 October 2026 View source.
7. Ludwig Volkmann, Iconografia dantesca: The Pictorial Representations to Dante's Divine Comedy (1899 English edition), printed pp. 110–12 (PDF pp. 150–52), challenging Lippmann's direct-influence claim and comparing the artists' designs; original edition consulted 1 October 2026 View source.
8. Uffizi Galleries, “Dante Illustrated: Inferno”, online exhibition of Zuccari's 1586–88 cycle, introduction and no. 31, Ninth Circle: Lucifer, GDSU inv. 3501 F; consulted 1 October 2026. The collection account does not establish direct access to Botticelli's sheet View source.
9. Image credit. Sandro Botticelli, Inferno XXXIV (2): Lucifer in Full Form, about 1488–95, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. Botticelli, Inferno 34,2. Photo: Philipp Allard. Public Domain Mark 1.0. View the full-size museum image View source · View source · View source.

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