Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante

This is a 2006 oil painting by Taiwanese artists Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An.

Echoes of classic art seem to spring out from every point – yet they are fiendishly elusive.

Pinning down the exact quotations of famous works is harder than it looks and can tease you just as certainly as trying to identify everyone. For starters, the painting alludes to an 18th-century genre known as the “conversation piece”, epitomised by Johann Zoffany’s Tribuna of the Uffizi (c 1770s).

Where Zoffany portrayed gatherings of cognoscenti or music lovers, once even the crowd at a cockfight, here we see an impossible gathering of historical figures in the afterlife. But that’s just the start of the art arcana . . .

1. The Queen’s head is superimposed on to the body and dress of Princesse Albert de Broglie as painted by Ingres in 1853.

2. The Chinese poet Li Bai falls backwards in his chair in exactly the same pose as a drunken reveller in William Hogarth’s painting An Election Entertainment (1754-5).

3. Deng Xiaoping adopts the classic nonchalant pose of Titian’s Portrait of a Man in London’s National Gallery, resting his arm as he turns towards us.

4. Rameses II sits in a similar pose to Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Lawrence Sterne, but by the time Reynolds used it this was already an ancient pose signifying melancholy.

5. Dante, whose religious poem The Divine Comedy is the key to this painting if its title is anything to go by, stands in profile like Piero di Cosimo’s portrait of Federigo da Montefeltro.

6. Napoleon poses as . . . wait for it, himself. His horse closely resembles his steed in Gros’s painting Napoleon on the Battlefield of Eylau, in the Louvre.

7. Leonardo da Vinci worked for evil rulers such as Cesare Borgia and here he listens politely to Stalin’s mad schemes.

8. Significant objects are displayed on the tables just as they might be in a Renaissance painting. The typewriter signifies that Li Bai is a poet.

9. Kofi Annan imitates the boy musician in Manet’s The Fife Player.

It is believed there are 103 characters in the painting but there is actually 104..  how many can you name?

Give up? This site names all the characters.

No related posts.