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Project Year: 2022
DIVINECOMEDY

Dante’s Inferno, Cantos 29 to 31, as a square book the reader turns in circles, with a picture made from the verse on every page.

Text
Inferno 29 to 31
School
IED Firenze
Advisor
Prof. Giovanni Iozzi
Year
2022
Format
28 × 28 cm
Status
Prototype
Deliverables
44-page Book Layout Design · Illustrations · Augmented Reality Experience
Tools
Adobe InDesign · Adobe Photoshop · Adobe Aero · Cinema 4D · Midjourney 1.0 · DALL·E 2

The cantos

Three cantos near the bottom of Hell.

The Divine Comedy follows Dante down through Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory and into Paradise, in a hundred cantos of three-line verse. Cantos 29 to 31 of the Inferno sit near the very bottom. In the last ditch of the eighth circle the falsifiers lie in heaps, sick with every kind of disease: alchemists, impersonators, counterfeiters, liars. Then fog, a horn blast, and the giants standing around the well that leads down to the last circle.

The brief was to give these three cantos a book of their own: the layout, the type and the cover, pictures for the text, and a way to step off the page into it.

The answer is a square book of 44 pages, 28 centimeters a side. Its cover sets the title in blackletter over a wheel of figures taken from an early illustrated page of Canto 29.

The square book closed on a cream background: the title Inferno in blackletter, Cantos 29, 30 and 31 below it, and an old round illustration of a wheel of figures filling the cover.
The cover · 28 × 28 cm

The page

One page, one full turn.

Dante’s verse moves in tercets, three lines at a time, each rhyme reaching into the next. The layout is built on that unit. Every page holds four tercets, one on each side of the picture, and each sits a quarter turn from the one before.

So the book has to be turned to be read. One page is one full rotation, a canto is about a dozen, and the reader circles down through the text much the way Dante circles down through Hell. Every line keeps its number from the canto, set in bold beside it, so the place is never lost.

Page 5 of the book, 280 millimeters square: the picture frame at the center and four tercets of Canto 29 around it, the first upright along the top, the second down the right side, the third upside down along the foot and the fourth up the left side, numbered.280 mm1THE many people and the divers wounds2These eyes of mine had so inebriated,3That they were wishful to stand still and weep;4But said Virgilius: “What dost thou still gaze at?5Why is thy sight still riveted down there6Among the mournful, mutilated shades?7Thou hast not done so at the other Bolge;8Consider, if to count them thou believest,9That two-and-twenty miles the valley winds,10And now the moon is underneath our feet;11Henceforth the time allotted us is brief,12And more is to be seen than what thou seest.”12345
  1. The first tercet runs upright along the top.
  2. A quarter turn: the second runs down the right side.
  3. Another quarter: the third runs upside down along the foot.
  4. The fourth climbs the left side and closes the circle.
  5. The picture holds the center, made from the twelve lines around it.
Page 5 · Inferno XXIX, lines 1 to 12 · hover or tap to turn the page
The book open at the start of Canto 29: on the left, Cantos 29 in blackletter inside a woodcut border; on the right, the first page, with a full moon over a hillside at the center and the verse turning around it.

The pictures

The verse is the prompt.

Every page has one picture, and each picture comes from the lines around it. In most cases the prompt was the verse itself, word for word, with only a hint of style added. Where the old English was too tangled, the line was retold in plainer words. Each page went through several rounds before one picture was kept and enlarged for print.

The aim was to see what an image model makes of Dante when it is given nothing but Dante. Some pictures follow the words closely. Others drift, and the drift often suits Hell better than a faithful illustration would.

Pale pink worms twisting through a brown haze, with small red shapes scattered among them, painted loosely.

The animals, down to the little worm,
All fell,

Inferno XXIX · 61–62
A pale winged figure in a red cloth stretched out in flight over a dark green landscape, in thick oil-paint strokes.

That I could rise by flight into the air,

Inferno XXIX · 113
A pale face in close-up, one dark eye ringed in red staring out, a hand at the cheek, over a cracked brick wall.

make sharp thine eye
Tow’rds me, so that my face well answer thee,

Inferno XXIX · 134–135
A hunched figure in black with a long beaked head, its round body becoming a lute, standing in a pale arched doorway.

I saw one made in fashion of a lute,

Inferno XXX · 49
Green hills under a dark sky, water pouring from them into a pool where pale hooded figures stand like falling streams.

The rivulets, that from the verdant hills
Of Cassentin descend down into Arno,

Inferno XXX · 64–65
Two old women in black hoods sitting on cold ground beside a smoking fire and a bundle in white, bare trees and falling snow behind them.

the two poor wretches
That smoke like unto a wet hand in winter,

Inferno XXX · 91–92

Six of the 37 pictures, each beside the lines it was made from

The book

Old paper, new pictures.

The look comes from early printed editions of the Comedy: warm, aged paper, a thin ruled frame around each picture, and a woodcut border that opens each canto. The pictures are new; the book around them feels old.

An old illustrated page of the Comedy with a round wheel of figures, beside three elements taken from early books: a sheet of aged paper, a thin line frame and an ornate woodcut border.
The source page · book paper · line frame · woodcut border

Titles are set in Dearest, a blackletter in the manner of the first printed books. The verse is in Charter, a sturdy serif drawn for clear reading, with its bold for the line numbers.

Inferno

Cantos 29 • Cantos 30 • Cantos 31

49I saw one made in fashion of a lute,

50If he had only had the groin cut off

51Just at the point at which a man is forked.

Dearest for titles · Charter for the verse, bold for line numbers · Inferno XXX, 49–51
The opening spread: a short note on the left that the pictures were made with image generators from the verse, and on the right a QR code for the AR experience.

Opening spread · a note on the pictures, and the AR code

A spread from Canto 29: a red and gold abstract painting on the left page and a pale horned creature on the right, the verse turning around each.

Inferno XXIX · lines 37 to 60

A spread from Canto 29: twisting pink worms on the left page and a boy seen from behind before a crowd on the right, the verse turning around each.

Inferno XXIX · lines 61 to 84

The back cover: the wheel illustration large across the top, and below it the title Inferno in blackletter with the cantos and the credits.

Back cover

And now the moon is underneath our feet.

Inferno XXIX · line 10 · stars after Giotto’s ceiling in Padua

Into the book

The cover is a door.

Alongside the print, the book has an augmented reality version that stands up in the room as a tunnel. The cover is the entrance, and every page is a doorway further in.

A pen sketch of a long vaulted tunnel with the book's cover and its round wheel as the door at the front.

First sketch

The finished 3D tunnel: cream walls between gold posts, a deep blue vault with gold stars, and the book's cover with its wheel as the door.

The tunnel, built

Tapping the cover turns its wheel, and the door swings open on the first page of Canto 29. Each tap turns the page a quarter, the same turn the printed book asks for, with the sound of stone sliding on stone. After a full turn the next page unlocks, and the tunnel carries the reader on to it.

Overhead runs a vault of deep blue scattered with gold stars, after the ceiling Giotto painted for the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. Dante knew the name: in Purgatorio, Giotto is the painter everyone is talking about.

Need a book people remember turning?

Brand identity, editorial design, campaigns and motion. Designer based in Florence, working wherever the brief is.

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