Falsifiers In Dante's Inferno

Dante wanted to send a warning in the Inferno that would stay in people imaginations. In order to convince the people of Italy to behave better. He describe the terrible punishments suffered by sinners which was a terrifying picture. He writes of falsifiers, “What the suffering would be if all the sick in the hospitals at Valdichiana, Maremma, and Sardinia, from July to September, were thrown down altogether in on ditch. Such was it there and such a stench surged up as usually comes from putrefying limbs.” Dante and Virgil encounters hell as any living moral would. For example, Dante becomes exhausted after climbing up the side of a ravine. All things that happen in hell are taken literally and experienced vividly which shocked readers to change

their ways.
Dante would have chosen Gustave Dore’s highly realistic engravings instead of William Blake’s watercolor paintings to illustrate the Inferno. Dore’s first depiction of the thieves from being attacked by snakes is a good example. Dore shows the suffering on each sinners face, revealing how each sinners struggle with the snake that has coiled around him or her. Together, the thieves and snakes create a scene that suggests the kind of chaos one might see in a brawl or a riot, which matches Dante’s words “Among this cruel and miserable swarm were people running stripped and terrified with no hope of hiding –hole or helicopter.” The artist rendering shows a creature with the anatomically correct body of a human being with an equally realistic bull’s head, which make a creature that we usually think of as fantastical seem monstrous and even a little sad