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Diagramming Dante: Michelangelo Caetani's Maps of the Divina Commedia (1855)

Charts and maps that try to visualise the contours of heaven, the dimensions of hell.

The first plate offers an overview of Dante’s cosmography, leading from the lowest circle of the Inferno up through the nine heavenly spheres to Empyrean, the highest level of Paradise and the dwelling place of God. Crowning Paradise, there is a funnel shape—the candida rosa, an amphitheater structure reserved for the souls of heaven—where Dante leaves behind Beatrice, his true love and guide, to come face-to-face with God and the Trinity. But he was careful with his commentary, hesitant to conjecture, and described, in a 1903 collection of his Dante-related correspondence, how scholars should avoid “anything extraneous or useless to the clarity of the concept that Dante wished to express in his so simple and plain, equally sublime and poetic passage[s]”.

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