Michelangelo Caetani’s Maps of the *Divina Commedia* (1855/1872) — The Public Domain Review

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. We get into specifics in plates IV–VI. The Inferno is visualized with a cutaway style that enforces its vertiginous depths. The initial hellish circles look like geological layers, but instead of crust and mantle, we find bands denoting limbo, lust, and gluttony with the relevant canto numbers. As our eyes descend, we are drawn into Malebolge, the eighth circle, whose ten “evil ditches” (male + bolgia) become a derelict high-rise. At the very bottom is Lucifer himself, in tiny form, intimating that even the demon’s colossal scale is no match for the depths of hell. Purgatory is rendered at eye level, from the perspective of some lucky soul sailing by this island-mountain. Its terraces are concentric, shrinking as they ascend, making the whole thing resemble a yellow wedding cake, its bride-and-groom topper obscured by Eden’s verdant groves. Caetani chose the most abstracted perspective for Paradise. The Inferno and Purgatory are now small blips on the page, worlds left behind, encircled by Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and the other heavenly spheres. 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. It mirrors both the conical pit of the Inferno and Purgatory’s tiered terraces, revealing Caetani’s visual sensitivity to Dante’s epic structure.