Rare Divine Comedy art released to mark Dante's death

Florence’s Uffizi Gallery is making available for viewing online 88 rarely displayed drawings of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” to mark the 700th anniversary in 2021 of the Italian poet’s death.

The virtual show of high-resolution images of works by the 16th-Century Renaissance artist Federico Zuccari were made accessible from Friday.

The drawings illustrate Dante’s masterpiece, “The Divine Comedy,” an epic poem in three parts recounting a pilgrim’s travels through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.

Dante Alighieri is revered as the father of the Italian language.

A Tuscan by birth, he died and was buried in the city of Ravenna, a three-time ancient capital located in the region of Emilia-Romagna.

The pencil-and-ink drawings are in contrasting shades of black and red.

Uffizi director Eike Schmidt said the drawings are a "great resource" for Dante scholars and students, as well as "anyone who likes to be inspired by Dante's pursuit of knowledge and virtue."

They were completed during Zuccari’s stay in Spain from 1586 to 1588, and became part of the Uffizi collection in 1738.

The drawings have only been publicly displayed twice previously, and then only a selection, owing to their fragility: in Florence in 1865 to mark the 600th anniversary of Dante’s birth and coinciding with Italy’s unification as a nation, and for a specialized exhibit about Dante in Abruzzo in 1993.