Paul Laffoley’s Dantean Triptych (1972-1975)

“Paul Laffoley’s extraordinary triptych of Dante’s Comedy brings Dante’s ‘altro dove’ (literally, ‘other where’) into a remarkably comprehensive and vivid translation. In the history of illustrations of the Comedy, there is nothing like it. Laffoley is the only artist, as far as I know, to have depicted all one hundred cantos and the topography of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, in the same piece.

“With the classical, religious, mathematical, esoteric, and cosmo-logical themes present in Laffoley’s opus, Dante’s Comedy was a natural text for him to turn his attention. The Divine Comedy triptych, 1972-75 (plates 29, 30, and 31), indubitably bares his trademarks of architectonic precision, mind-boggling detail, immense erudition, symmetry, balance, and the word-techniques that lend themselves to an illustration of something as vast, multidimensional, intricate, and based in language and interpretation as Dante’s Comedy.”    — Arielle Saiber, “Laffoley and Dante’s Other Worlds,” in The Essential Paul Laffoley, ed. Doug Walla (2016), 23-29.