Dante's Inferno

Gustave Doré is a prime example of the type of images Dante tried to depict while writing “Dante’s inferno.” Dante wanted the emotion of the story to be dark and not at all bright or cheerful. When I view William Blake’s drawings I don’t feel frightened, petrified or even scared. He constructed his pictures in a bright cheerful and that takes away the feeling that Dante tried to create. I feel if William Blake didn’t fill his pictures with color and darkened up his sky, the pictures would have the same emotion that the story depicts. However, that was William Blake’s interpretation of the story and how he felt to describe it.
William Blake’s interpretations of “Dante’s inferno” were, in my opinion, not what Dante imagined because Dante talked about the nine circles of Hell being dark and dreary. William Blake’s made the story seem bright and colorful instead of making the
viewer understand it was a scary experience. “In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straightway was lost,” a quote by Dante. This shows that the mood of the story was suppose to be uneasy and timorous. Gustave Doré illustrated that mood perfectly by using only black, white, and grey. Also, the emotion on the faces he has drawn makes you understand the feeling of the characters. William Blake’s don’t make me think of Hell, I think of a forest on a sunny day not a dark, fiery pit. In Gustave Doré drawing regarding Dante astray in the dusky woods, you can instantly tell that there is a sense of fear and fright.
The tone of the sentence matches the tone of the picture exactly. The picture creates suspense by the path through the forest blacked out, in order not to see what lurks in there. Imagine you are walking alone in the forest and you are no longer able to see the path you were walking on, it’s incredibly dark and you can’t see what is in front of you and you can’t see what is behind you. You would be petrified, that’s the exact emotion that Gustave Doré created for Dante.
All in All, I think Gustave Doré would have been a better artist for “Dante’s inferno.” He chooses to take a different route compared to William Blake and it created a much stronger emotional feeling. I do think that it would have to depend on the interpretation of the reader. For example, my interpretation of “Dante’s Inferno” might be completely different for another reader. This explains why Gustave Doré pictures were dark and dreadful while William Blake’s were bright and not so scary or
worrisome.