A marble statue of Michelangelo Pistoletto, an Italian painter, action and object artist, and art theorist, stands in the square in front of Porta Romana in Florence in the center of a roundabout. It is from here that Robert and Sienna start their adventure in the novel Inferno.
The painter, architect and writer Giorgio Vasari (Arezzo 1511 – Florence 1574), whom Dan Brown frequently refers to in his Inferno through his protagonist Robert Langdon as “the first art historian in the world”, is celebrated at Palatine Gallery in Florence by the exhibition Giorgio Vasari e l’Allegoria della Pazienza (Giorgio Vasari and the Allegory of Patience), which runs from November 26, 2013 to January 5, 2014.
Thus spoke Robert Langdon upon realizing that he had arrived in Florence:
Florence whose galleries lured millions of travelers to admire Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Leonardo’s Annunciation, and the city’s pride and joy – Il Davide.
(Dan Brown, Inferno)
The Annunciation has been located in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence since 1867. It came from the church of San Bartolomeo a Monteoliveto, in the environs of Florence.
On 1501 Florence was a Republic. To celebrate the virtues of the Republic Michelangelo was commissioned by the affluent Arte della Lana (Guild of Wool Merchants) to create the statue famously known as “David”.
The following is a selection of artists whose works of art have been inspired by The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.
Along the walls of the Hall of the Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio lie six groups of statues representing the Labours of Hercules.
They were sculpted by Vincenzo de’ Rossi (Fiesole, 1525 – Florence, 1587), a contemporary of Giambologna, between 1562 and 1584.
LEGEND PROCLAIMS THAT it is physically impossible, upon entering the Baptistry of San Giovanni, not to look up. Langdon, despite having been in this room many times, now felt the mystical pull of the space, and let his gaze climb skyward to the ceiling.
In 1504, one of the most important artistic disputes in history took place in the Hall of the Five Hundred: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti were summoned to fresco this important Palazzo Vecchio hall with scenes of two key battles in the history of the Florentine Republic—the Battle of Anghiari (la Battaglia di Anghiari) and the Battle of Cascina (la Battaglia di Cascina).
Robert Langdon and Sienna wander in the Palazzo Vecchio in search of new clues, and a very special statue catches their attention.
We are talking about the statue of Hercules and Diomedes in the Hall of the Five Hundred.
For the love of God, in Italian Per l’amor di Dio, is a sculpture created in 2007 by English contemporary artist Damien Hirst. It consists of a human skull cast in platinum enriched with 8,601 diamonds, including a pink diamond-shaped drop—the so-called marquise diamond, located on the front of the skull.
The Map of Hell (in Italian La Mappa dell’Inferno) by Botticelli – regularly called The Abyss of Hell or La Voragine dell’Inferno – is one of the parchments that the famous Italian painter designed to illustrate an edition of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.
