Dante’s

boat
Delacroix
• Dante's Boat Dante is an oil
painting on canvas by the French
painter Eugène Delacroix, made
in 1822 and preserved at the
Musée du Louvre in Paris.
• In the foreground are portraits of Dante, wearing a red hood and a
green and white suit, and Master Virgil crossing the wide moat of the
Styx River on a boat piloted by Flegias, the custodian of the fifth
circle.
• From a stylistic point of view, among the most obvious landmarks are
Michelangelo, for the chiaroscuro treatment of the bodies of the
damned, and The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault, from
which he takes up the strongly emotional style and the pyramidal
construction.
• In 1821, in a letter addressed to his sister Henriette de Verniac,
Delacroix expressed his desire to make a painting for the Parisian
Salon of the following year, so as to ‘acquire some notoriety’.
• Initially in the painting was to be depicted an episode of the foremy,
that of Dante's encounter with the she-wolf, a symbol of insatiable
lusts;only later Delacroix chose another moment of the poet's
otherworldly journey, perhaps even more dramatic, that of the two
pilgrims transported by Flegias.
• The work was purchased in the summer of 1822 by the French State
for a sum of two thousand francs, to keep it in the Luxembourg
palace; it was transferred to the Musée du Louvre (its current
location) eleven years after the death of Delacroix, in 1874.