Gustave Doré's Inferno: Every Illustration Explained, Circle by Circle

In 1861, a 29-year-old illustrator from Strasbourg published a huge folio volume that would fix, for the next century and a half, the way the world imagines Hell. Gustave Doré's 75 engravings for Dante's Inferno gave faces to Charon, Minos, Geryon and Lucifer, and turned Paolo and Francesca into the most famous doomed lovers in art.

This guide walks through every one of Doré's 75 Inferno illustrations, in order, following Dante and Virgil down through the nine circles of Hell: what each plate shows, which sinners you are looking at, and what Doré added that Dante never wrote. Use it as a reading companion, as an art history primer, or simply to choose the plate you want on your wall.

Contents

• Gustave Doré and the Inferno of 1861
• Dante's Hell at a glance: the nine circles
• The dark wood (Cantos I–II) — plates 1 to 7
• The Gate of Hell and the Acheron (Canto III) — plates 8 to 10
• Circle 1: Limbo — plates 11 and 12
• Circle 2: Lust — plates 13 to 18
• Circle 3: Gluttony — plates 19 and 20
• Circle 4: Greed — plates 21 and 22
• Circle 5: Wrath and the Styx — plates 23 to 25
• The City of Dis — plates 26 to 28
• Circle 6: Heresy — plates 29 to 31
• Circle 7: Violence — plates 32 to 41
• Circle 8: Fraud, the Malebolge — plates 42 to 63
• The Well of the Giants — plates 64 to 66
• Circle 9: Treachery, the frozen lake of Cocytus — plates 67 to 73
• Out of Hell: "to see the stars" — plates 74 and 75
• FAQ

Gustave Doré and the Inferno of 1861

Gustave Doré (1832–1883) was already the most sought-after illustrator in Paris when he set himself an outrageous goal: to illustrate the great masterpieces of world literature in large, uniform folio volumes. Dante came first. Publishers balked at the cost of such a luxurious book, so Doré financed the Inferno himself. It was published by Hachette in 1861 and was an immediate success. Purgatorio and Paradiso followed in 1868, bringing the whole Divine Comedy to 135 plates.

These images are wood engravings. Doré drew directly onto blocks of end-grain boxwood, and a team of master engravers (Héliodore Pisan foremost among them) cut his washes and lines into the wood. That is why the plates have their characteristic look: velvety blacks, silvery greys and light that seems to come from nowhere. Doré was not a literal illustrator. He was a stage director. He chose vast rock walls, vertiginous perspectives and crowds of bodies to make the reader feel the scale of Hell, something the text can only describe.

The numbering below follows the order of the plates in the book, from the dark wood of Canto I to the last glimpse of the stars in Canto XXXIV.

Doré on your walls: discover our Gustave Doré engraving prints, printed on museum-quality paper.

Dante's Hell at a glance: the nine circles

Dante imagines Hell as an immense funnel sunk beneath Jerusalem. The deeper you go, the narrower the circles and the heavier the sins: first the sins of weakness (incontinence), then violence, then fraud, and finally treachery, at the very bottom, locked in ice around Lucifer.

Zone	Sin	Guardian / key figure	Cantos	Doré plates
Dark wood & journey	—	Virgil, Beatrice	I–II	7
Vestibule & Acheron	The neutral, the indifferent	Charon	III	3
Circle 1 — Limbo	Unbaptised & virtuous pagans	Homer	IV	2
Circle 2	Lust	Minos	V	6
Circle 3	Gluttony	Cerberus	VI	2
Circle 4	Greed (avarice & prodigality)	Plutus	VII	2
Circle 5 — Styx	Wrath & sullenness	Phlegyas	VII–VIII	3
City of Dis	—	Fallen angels, the Furies	VIII–IX	3
Circle 6	Heresy	Farinata	IX–XI	3
Circle 7	Violence (against others, self, God)	Minotaur, centaurs, Harpies, Geryon	XII–XVII	10
Circle 8 — Malebolge	Fraud (10 ditches)	Malebranche demons	XVIII–XXX	22
Well of the Giants	—	Nimrod, Ephialtes, Antaeus	XXXI	3
Circle 9 — Cocytus	Treachery	Lucifer	XXXII–XXXIV	7
Exit	—	—	XXXIV	2

A detail that tells you a lot about Doré's choices: he left several cantos without a single plate (XVI, XX and XXVII), but gave six to Canto V, the canto of Paolo and Francesca, and seven to the last circle. He illustrated what moved him, not what was simply "important".

The dark wood (Cantos I–II)

1. The Dark Wood

"In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray." The most famous opening in European poetry becomes, under Doré's hand, a cathedral of trees. Dante is tiny, hesitant, swallowed by trunks that close over him like the vaults of a church. The forest is sin, confusion, the middle-aged man who has lost his way. Doré makes us feel it before we understand it.

2. The Leopard on the Hillside

Dante tries to climb a sunlit hill, the promise of salvation, but a light, spotted beast bars his way: the lonza, usually read as a leopard or panther and traditionally as a symbol of lust. Doré sets the animal almost at eye level with the poet, graceful and obstinate. It does not attack. It simply will not let him pass.

3. The Lion and the She-Wolf

Two more beasts follow: a lion with its head held high, pride, and a gaunt she-wolf that seems laden with every craving, greed, the most dangerous of the three. It is the she-wolf that finally drives Dante back down towards the darkness. The three animals form the first allegory of the poem: the sins that stop a man from climbing towards the light by his own efforts alone.

4. Virgil Appears

At the moment of despair a figure appears: Virgil, the poet of the Aeneid, dead for thirteen centuries. Doré gives him the laurel wreath and long robe he will wear throughout the book, and a calm, almost paternal authority. He offers Dante the only way out: not straight up the hill, but down, through Hell.

5. The Journey Begins

The last line of Canto I is a simple image: the guide walks ahead, the pupil follows. Doré turns it into a landscape, two small silhouettes crossing a wilderness of rock. It is a visual motif he will repeat for 70 plates: two men, tiny, against something enormous.

6. Nightfall

Canto II opens at dusk: every living creature goes to rest, and only Dante prepares for a double ordeal: the hardship of the road and the pity he will feel. Doré, a master of twilight, lets the light drain from the sky. It is also the canto of doubt. Dante wonders whether he, who is neither Aeneas nor Saint Paul, is worthy of such a journey.

7. Beatrice Sends Virgil

Virgil reassures Dante by explaining why he came: Beatrice, the woman Dante loved and who died young, came down from Heaven to Limbo to ask him to rescue her friend. It is the only luminous plate of the opening: Doré surrounds Beatrice with light, as if a window had opened in the underworld. The whole journey is set in motion by an act of love.

The Gate of Hell and the Acheron (Canto III)

8. The Gate of Hell

"Through me you pass into the city of woe…" The inscription above the gate ends with the most quoted line of the Inferno: "All hope abandon ye who enter here." Doré shows the gate as a gaping mouth in the rock, the inscription carved into the stone, and Dante clinging to Virgil. This is one of the most reproduced images in the series, and the first time the reader feels the true scale of the place.

9. Charon

An old man "hoary white with eld", with wheels of flame around his eyes, rows across the black river crying "Woe to you, wicked spirits!" Dante borrows Charon from ancient mythology and makes him a demon. Doré makes him a force of nature: arm raised, beard in the wind, looming over a crowd of trembling souls. Before entering Hell proper, Dante has already passed the vestibule of the neutral, souls who never took sides and who are refused by both Heaven and Hell.

10. The Souls on the Shore of Acheron

Dante compares the souls to autumn leaves falling one after the other from a branch. They curse God and their parents, yet hurry to cross, because divine justice spurs them on until their fear turns into desire. Doré piles up the naked bodies on the bank, a mass that anticipates the great crowd scenes of the circles to come.

Circle 1: Limbo (Canto IV)

11. Limbo

The first circle holds no torture, only sighs. Here live the unbaptised children and the virtuous men and women who lived before Christ. Their only punishment is to desire God without hope. This is Virgil's own home, which explains his sadness. Doré fills the plate with a soft, grey, almost dreamlike crowd: the saddest place in Hell is also the gentlest.

12. Homer and the Great Poets

Four majestic figures come to meet the travellers: Homer, sword in hand, followed by Horace, Ovid and Lucan. They welcome Dante as the sixth member of their company, a stroke of pride the poet grants himself. Further on, in a noble castle with seven walls, he sees Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Euclid, Avicenna and the heroes of Troy and Rome. Doré stages the scene as a meeting of gods on a misty plain.

Circle 2: Lust (Canto V)

13. Minos

At the entrance to the second circle sits Minos, the legendary king of Crete, turned by Dante into a monstrous judge. Each soul confesses everything before him, and he wraps his tail around his body as many times as the number of the circle it is condemned to. Doré makes him a colossal, pitiless figure, towering over the naked souls queuing up at his feet.

14. The Infernal Hurricane

The lustful let themselves be carried away by passion in life. In death they are carried away forever by a wind that never drops. It is one of Dante's most elegant punishments, and one of Doré's most spectacular plates: an endless spiral of bodies against a black sky, like flocks of starlings. The image has influenced painters and filmmakers ever since.

15. The Procession of Lovers

Virgil names the great figures of the storm: Semiramis, Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Achilles, Paris, Tristan… more than a thousand shades whom love parted from life. Dante notices two souls who fly together and seem so light upon the wind, and asks to speak to them. Virgil tells him to call them in the name of the love that leads them.

16. Paolo and Francesca

Francesca da Rimini, married for political reasons to Gianciotto Malatesta, fell in love with his younger brother Paolo. Her husband killed them both. Her speech is built on the famous triple "Love…": love that seizes the gentle heart, love that lets no one who is loved escape loving in return, love that "brought us to one death". Doré's plate, the two lovers entwined and suspended in the void, is probably the most reproduced image of the whole series.

17. The Lovers Surprised

Francesca tells how it all began: one day, alone, they were reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere. At the passage of the kiss, Paolo kissed her mouth, trembling all over. That day, she says, they read no further. Doré leaves Hell for a moment and shows the scene on earth. It is the only way he can show what Dante leaves unsaid: the husband's sword that ends the story.

18. Dante Faints

While Francesca speaks, Paolo weeps. Overwhelmed with pity, Dante loses consciousness and falls like a dead body, the famous last line of the canto. Six plates for a single canto: Doré clearly shared the Romantic fascination with these lovers, who had already inspired Ingres, Ary Scheffer and, later, Rodin's Kiss.

Circle 3: Gluttony (Canto VI)

19. Cerberus

The gluttons lie in stinking mud under an eternal rain of hail, dirty water and snow, while Cerberus, the three-headed dog of mythology, claws and flays them. To get past, Virgil simply throws a handful of earth into his three gaping mouths. Doré gives the monster a half-canine, half-demonic body, rising out of the downpour.

20. Ciacco

One of the gluttons sits up: Ciacco ("the hog"), a Florentine. He describes his city as "heap'd with envy to the brim" and gives the first of the political prophecies that run through the Inferno: the civil war between the Florentine factions. Then he falls back into the mud, not to rise again before the Last Judgement.

Circle 4: Greed (Canto VII)

21. Plutus

The guardian of the fourth circle greets the travellers with a cry that has puzzled commentators for seven centuries: "Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe!" Plutus, god of wealth, is here a swollen demon. A single word from Virgil is enough to make him collapse, like sails swollen by the wind falling when the mast snaps.

22. Hoarders and Wasters

Two crowds push enormous weights with their chests in opposite directions around the circle, crash into each other, insult each other ("Why hoard?" "Why waste?"), turn around and start again. Dante notes that many of them were clerics, popes and cardinals. Doré plays on the absurd, endless mechanism of the punishment: a human machine turning in the void.

Circle 5: Wrath and the Styx (Cantos VII–VIII)

23. The Wrathful in the Styx

In the black mud of the Styx, the wrathful strike each other with their hands, heads, chests and feet, and tear each other to pieces with their teeth. Beneath the surface, the sullen, who were sulky and bitter in life, gurgle and blow bubbles. Doré's bodies emerge from the swamp as in a battle painting, but without any cause worth fighting for.

24. Phlegyas

A signal fire flashes from a tower, and a boat arrives, swift as an arrow: Phlegyas, a mythological king punished for burning Apollo's temple, carries the two poets across the marsh. The boat sinks lower in the water under Dante's weight. He is the only living body ever to have boarded it. In the distance the red towers of the city of Dis begin to appear.

25. Filippo Argenti

A mud-covered soul clings to the side of the boat: Filippo Argenti, a Florentine knight notorious for his violence, and a personal enemy of Dante. For once the poet shows no pity and wishes to see him plunged back into the mud, and Virgil approves. The other wrathful fall upon Argenti, who turns his teeth on himself. It is one of the darkest scenes in the book, and Dante's most human.

The City of Dis (Cantos VIII–IX)

26. The Gates of Dis

Behind the iron walls of Dis begins lower Hell, where the sins of malice are punished. More than a thousand fallen angels crowd the ramparts and slam the gates in Virgil's face. For the first time the guide is powerless, and Dante is terrified. Doré multiplies the winged silhouettes on the walls: a whole army of rebels.

27. The Three Furies

On top of a burning tower appear the three Furies, stained with blood, with green hydras for belts and horned serpents for hair. They tear at their breasts and call for Medusa to turn Dante to stone. Virgil makes him turn around and covers his eyes with his own hands. Doré plays on the vertical: three monstrous women against the sky, and far below, two small men.

28. The Heavenly Messenger

With a crash of thunder, a heavenly envoy crosses the Styx without wetting his feet. The damned scatter before him like frogs before a snake. With a simple wand he opens the gates of Dis, scolds the demons and leaves without a word to the travellers. Doré, who loves a contrast, puts a figure of pure light in the middle of the black plate.

Circle 6: Heresy (Cantos IX–XI)

29. The Burning Tombs

Inside the walls stretches an immense cemetery of open tombs, each heated red-hot by flames. The heretics lie inside, grouped by sect, and the lids will be sealed forever after the Last Judgement. Doré's perspective of sarcophagi receding to the horizon is one of his most striking compositions.

30. Farinata

From one of the tombs, a man stands up to the waist, as if he held Hell in contempt: Farinata degli Uberti, leader of the Ghibelline faction and an adversary of Dante's family. Even in torment he remains proud, and talks politics. Doré captures that stubborn dignity, the upright bust of a leader rising from the flames.

31. The Tomb of Pope Anastasius

To get used to the stench rising from the depths, the poets stop behind a large tomb bearing the inscription "I hold Pope Anastasius". Virgil uses the pause to explain the architecture of lower Hell: violence, fraud and treachery. For the reader, Canto XI is the map. For Doré, it is a moment of silence, two figures in the shadow of a monument.

Circle 7: Violence (Cantos XII–XVII)

The seventh circle is divided into three rings: violence against others (murderers and tyrants), against oneself (suicides and spendthrifts) and against God, nature and art (blasphemers, sodomites and usurers, as Dante classifies them). Doré devotes ten plates to it, including some of his most famous monsters.

32. The Minotaur

On a chaos of fallen rocks, a landslide caused by the earthquake at Christ's death, lies the Minotaur, guardian of the violent. At the sight of the poets he bites himself with rage. Virgil mocks him by recalling Theseus, and the monster starts thrashing about like a bull struck by the fatal blow. Dante and Virgil take advantage of this to slip past.

33. The Centaurs

Thousands of centaurs gallop along the banks of the Phlegethon, shooting arrows at any soul that rises higher out of the blood than its sin allows. Their leader Chiron, the wise tutor of Achilles, parts his beard with an arrow to speak. He gives the poets an escort: Nessus, the centaur who died for trying to abduct Hercules' wife.

34. The River of Blood

Carried along by Nessus, Dante sees tyrants plunged up to their eyebrows in boiling blood (Alexander, Dionysius of Syracuse, Attila), then murderers submerged to the throat. The deeper the crime, the deeper the soul. Doré lays out the river like a vast infernal landscape, where the heads of the damned dot the surface.

35. The Harpies

The second ring is a forest without paths, where the trees have no green leaves, only black ones, and the branches are twisted and thorny. In the branches nest the Harpies, birds with women's faces, broad wings and clawed feet, who feed on the leaves. Doré's forest of suicides is one of the most haunting images of the book, often borrowed by illustrators of fantasy and horror.

36. The Bleeding Tree

On Virgil's advice, Dante breaks off a twig. The trunk bleeds and cries out: the suicides have been turned into trees, and only speak through their wounds. This one is Pier della Vigna, secretary of Emperor Frederick II, who killed himself after being falsely accused of treason. Doré shows the exact moment: the snapped branch, the dark sap, Dante recoiling.

37. The Hunt of the Spendthrifts

A crash in the undergrowth: two naked souls run past, pursued by a pack of ravenous black bitches. They are spendthrifts, violent against their own property: Lano of Siena and Jacopo da Sant'Andrea. The hounds catch the second and tear him to pieces. Doré turns the scene into a dark hunting picture, the pack plunging between the trunks.

38. The Rain of Fire

The third ring is a desert of burning sand where flakes of fire fall slowly, like snow in the Alps on a windless day. Blasphemers lie on their backs, others crouch or wander endlessly. Among them, the giant Capaneus, who defied Jupiter, still insults the gods. Doré turns Dante's comparison into poetry: a snowfall of flame over a black desert.

39. Brunetto Latini

A soul with a burnt face grabs Dante by the hem of his robe: it is Brunetto Latini, the scholar who taught him how a man makes himself eternal. The scene is one of the most moving in the poem. Dante speaks with deep respect and gratitude to the master he has nevertheless placed in Hell. Doré captures the gesture of recognition between the living and the damned.

40. Geryon

From the abyss rises Geryon, image of fraud: the face of an honest man, the body of a serpent covered in knots and circles, hairy paws, and a forked tail ending in a scorpion's sting. It is one of Dante's great inventions, and Doré gives it all its ambiguous majesty, the calm face above the coiled monster.

41. The Descent on Geryon

The only way down to the eighth circle is on the monster's back. Geryon swims through the air in slow circles, like a falcon returning to the falconer, while Dante clings on in terror, seeing flames and hearing laments below. Doré produces one of the first great "flight" images in illustration: vertigo, emptiness, and two tiny men on a monster.

Monsters, demons and giants: Doré's bestiary continues in our Gustave Doré collection, from the Leviathan to the sea monsters of Orlando Furioso.

Circle 8: Fraud, the Malebolge (Cantos XVIII–XXX)

The eighth circle, Malebolge ("evil pouches"), is a vast stone amphitheatre divided into ten concentric ditches, each spanned by rock bridges. Each ditch punishes one form of fraud. It is the circle Doré illustrated the most: 22 plates.

42. Panderers and Seducers

In the first ditch, two columns of naked sinners walk in opposite directions, driven by horned demons with great whips: "none for the second waited nor the third", Dante notes. On one side the panderers, who sold women to others, on the other the seducers, including the mythological hero Jason, who abandoned Hypsipyle and Medea.

43. The Flatterers

In the second ditch, the flatterers wallow in excrement, the same substance, Dante suggests, as their words. One of them, Alessio Interminei of Lucca, is so covered that Dante cannot tell whether he is a layman or a cleric. Doré, never vulgar, makes the ditch a dark and sticky abyss, seen from the top of the bridge.

44. Thaïs

Virgil points out a dishevelled woman who claws at herself with filthy nails, now crouching, now standing: Thaïs, the courtesan of a Latin comedy by Terence, punished for a flattering reply to her lover. With this solitary, almost theatrical figure, Doré closes the canto of the flatterers.

45. The Simoniac Pope

The simoniacs, who sold sacred things and church offices, are planted upside down in holes in the rock, the soles of their feet burning. One of them, Pope Nicholas III, mistakes Dante for Boniface VIII, the living pope Dante hated, and is astonished that he has arrived "so early". It is Dante's boldest attack on the corruption of the Church, and Doré shows the poet bent over the hole, listening.

46. The Boiling Pitch

Doré skips the fourth ditch, that of the diviners with their heads twisted backwards, and goes straight to the fifth. Here, corrupt officials (the barrators) boil in a lake of pitch, like the tar in the arsenal of Venice. A black demon arrives carrying a magistrate of Lucca on his shoulders and throws him in. The others push him under with their hooks, like cooks pushing meat down into the pot.

47. The Malebranche

The demons of this ditch, the Malebranche ("evil claws"), have grotesque names: Malacoda, Scarmiglione, Barbariccia, Graffiacane… They rush at Virgil with their hooks raised. He calmly asks to speak to their chief, and Malacoda lets them pass, giving them an escort (and a lie about a bridge). These cantos are the comic interlude of the Inferno, and Doré enjoys drawing the band of devils.

48. Ciampolo's Escape

A sinner from Navarre, Ciampolo, has been hooked out of the pitch. He offers to call up other damned souls if the demons step back, then takes advantage of their distraction and dives back in. The demon Alichino flies after him but is too late: "Thou art caught!" he shouts, in vain. Doré catches the moment of the leap, the scene of a farce in a Gothic setting.

49. The Demons' Brawl

Furious at having been fooled, the demon Calcabrina turns on Alichino. The two claw at each other in mid-air like birds of prey and fall together into the boiling lake, where they stick like flies. Their companions have to fish them out with hooks. Dante and Virgil take advantage of the confusion to slip away.

50. The Escape

The demons chase after the poets. Virgil takes Dante in his arms, as a mother snatches up her child when the house is on fire, and slides down the rock wall into the next ditch, where the demons are not allowed to follow. It is one of the tenderest images in the book: the guide becomes a father.

51. The Hypocrites

In the sixth ditch, the hypocrites walk with infinite slowness, weighed down by great hooded cloaks: gilded and dazzling outside, solid lead inside. Two of them address Dante: Catalano and Loderingo, two "Jovial Friars" of Bologna who were supposed to keep the peace in Florence. Doré draws a procession of monks bowed under the weight of their appearance.

52. Caiaphas

On the ground, crucified with three stakes, lies Caiaphas, the high priest who advised that one man should die for the people. Every hypocrite passing by tramples him with the full weight of his leaden cloak. Doré reverses the Crucifixion: the cross lies flat and the condemned man is crushed by the crowd.

53. The Thieves and the Serpents

The seventh ditch swarms with more serpents than all the deserts of Libya. The thieves run naked among them, their hands tied behind their backs by the snakes. One of them, Vanni Fucci, is bitten, bursts into flames, turns to ash and re-forms, like the phoenix. Doré's tangle of bodies and reptiles is one of his most virtuoso plates.

54. The Metamorphosis

A six-footed serpent leaps onto the thief Agnello Brunelleschi and clings to him like ivy. Their two bodies melt together like heated wax, and their two heads become one. Dante boasts here of surpassing Ovid and Lucan in the art of metamorphosis. Doré takes up the challenge and shows the monstrous fusion as it happens.

55. The Flames of the False Counselors

Leaning from the bridge, Dante sees the eighth ditch dotted with flames, like the fireflies a peasant sees in the valley on a summer evening. Each flame hides a false counselor. A double-horned flame holds Ulysses and Diomedes. Ulysses tells of his last voyage beyond the Pillars of Hercules, in pursuit of virtue and knowledge, and of his shipwreck in sight of a mountain, one of the most famous passages of the Inferno.

56. Muhammad

The ninth ditch punishes the "sowers of discord", whose bodies are split open by a demon's sword, just as they split communities apart. Following the polemical views of medieval Christianity, Dante placed the Prophet Muhammad here, along with Ali. This passage is widely regarded today as offensive, and some modern editions and adaptations choose not to reproduce the illustration. It remains an important document for understanding how the medieval West saw Islam, and how that view was carried into the 19th century.

57. Pier da Medicina

A soul with a pierced throat, nose cut off and only one ear raises itself to speak: Pier da Medicina, who stirred up hatred between the lords of Romagna. Beside him, Curio, the man who urged Caesar to cross the Rubicon, can no longer speak: his tongue has been cut out. The punishment always mirrors the sin. Scholars call this principle the contrapasso.

58. Bertrand de Born

Here is one of the most striking images in the whole Inferno: a headless body walking, holding its severed head by the hair like a lantern. The head speaks. It is Bertrand de Born, a Provençal troubadour said to have set the young prince Henry against his father, King Henry II of England. Because he divided father and son, his own head is divided from his body. Doré turns the scene into a nightmarish apparition in the half-light.

59. Geri del Bello

Dante's eyes are "inebriate" with the sight of so many wounds, and Virgil has to shake him: why does he keep staring? Dante confesses he was looking for someone. Virgil saw him: Geri del Bello, a cousin of Dante's father, murdered and never avenged by his family, who pointed a threatening finger at the poet. A family story of vendetta, told at the edge of the abyss.

60. The Stricken Falsifiers

The tenth and last ditch is a hospital of Hell. The falsifiers (alchemists, counterfeiters, impostors and liars) lie heaped on top of each other, eaten by disease, dropsy, fever and leprosy. Dante compares the scene to the plague on the island of Aegina, when all the people died. Doré draws a field of bodies stretching into the dark.

61. Griffolino and Capocchio

Two sinners sit propped against each other like two pans leaned together to warm, covered in scabs they scratch furiously with their nails, like a knife scaling a fish. They are two alchemists: Griffolino of Arezzo, burned for claiming he could fly, and Capocchio, who aped nature by counterfeiting metals.

62. Gianni Schicchi

Two naked, raging shades run through the ditch, biting like pigs let out of the sty. One of them sinks his fangs into Capocchio's neck and drags him along, his belly scraping the ground. It is Gianni Schicchi, who impersonated the dead Buoso Donati to dictate a false will in his own favour. The story later inspired Puccini's comic opera Gianni Schicchi (1918).

63. Myrrha

The other raging shade is Myrrha, the princess of Ovid's Metamorphoses who disguised herself as another woman to deceive her own father. She is punished here as an impostor, a falsifier of her own person. The canto ends with a comic quarrel between Master Adam, a counterfeiter swollen with dropsy, and Sinon, the Greek who deceived the Trojans with the wooden horse. Virgil scolds Dante for listening to it with too much pleasure.

The Well of the Giants (Canto XXXI)

64. Nimrod

In the mist, Dante thinks he sees towers, like the walls of Monteriggioni. In fact they are giants, sunk up to the waist in the well that leads to the last circle. The first is Nimrod, builder of the Tower of Babel, who can only babble a meaningless sentence and blow into his horn. Doré plays on the ambiguity between architecture and body: the giants are part of the landscape.

65. Ephialtes

Further on stands Ephialtes, one of the giants who tried to storm Olympus, bound with a chain that wraps around him five times. When he shakes himself, the earth trembles more violently than in an earthquake. Dante, terrified, has never been so afraid of dying. Doré's giant, all muscle and rage, recalls the nudes of Michelangelo.

66. Antaeus

Antaeus, the only giant left unchained because he took no part in the revolt against the gods, agrees to help. He takes the two poets in his hand and sets them gently down on the ice of the last circle, then straightens up "as in a bark the stately mast". The perspective, from below, gives an idea of the dizzying scale Doré wanted for the whole book.

Circle 9: Treachery, the frozen lake of Cocytus (Cantos XXXII–XXXIV)

At the very bottom of Hell there is no fire, only ice. The traitors are frozen in the lake of Cocytus, in four zones: Caina (traitors to their kin), Antenora (to their country or party), Ptolomea (to their guests) and Judecca (to their lords and benefactors). The deeper the betrayal, the deeper they are trapped in the ice.

67. The Frozen Traitors

The lake is frozen so hard that a mountain falling on it would not make it crack. The traitors are trapped up to the face, like frogs poking their snouts out of the water, heads bowed, teeth chattering like storks' beaks. Two brothers who killed each other are frozen so close that their hair is tangled together. Doré's icy, lunar plate contrasts with all the flames that came before.

68. Bocca degli Abati

Walking among the heads, Dante kicks one in the face. The soul refuses to give its name, so Dante grabs it by the hair and tears out whole tufts. Another damned soul betrays him: this is Bocca degli Abati, who caused the Florentine Guelphs' defeat at Montaperti by cutting off the standard-bearer's hand. In the pit of treachery, even Dante becomes cruel.

69. Ugolino and Ruggieri

In a single hole in the ice, two heads: one gnaws at the other's skull, "where the spine joins it", like a starving man biting into bread. The man eating is Count Ugolino della Gherardesca. His victim is Archbishop Ruggieri of Pisa. Dante asks him why, and the answer fills the next canto: one of the most terrible stories in all literature.

70. Ugolino and His Sons

In 1289, betrayed by Ruggieri, Ugolino was locked in a tower in Pisa with his sons and grandsons, and the door was nailed shut. When he bites his hands in grief, the children think he is hungry, and offer him their own flesh. The scene fascinated the 19th century. Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux was sculpting his Ugolino at the very same time as Doré was engraving his, and Rodin would later take up the subject.

71. One by One

On the fourth day, Gaddo throws himself at his father's feet, asks him why he will not help him, and dies. Ugolino sees the three others fall one by one between the fifth and sixth day. Doré, usually so theatrical, chooses restraint here: a closed room, a few bodies, darkness.

72. Hunger Stronger than Grief

Gone blind, Ugolino gropes over the bodies and calls their names for two days after their deaths. "Then fasting got the mastery of grief." The line is deliberately ambiguous, and readers have argued about it for centuries: did Ugolino simply die of hunger, or did hunger drive him to the unthinkable? Dante does not say. Ugolino falls silent and goes back to gnawing his enemy's skull.

73. Lucifer, Emperor of Hell

At the centre of the earth, in the ice of Judecca, where the traitors to their lords are entirely covered like straws in glass, Dante sees the emperor of the kingdom of sorrow emerge from the ice at mid-chest: Lucifer, once the most beautiful of the angels. Doré sets him in an immense cavern hung with icicles, his bat wings spread from wall to wall, whose beating produces the wind that freezes Cocytus. At first glance he looks almost pensive, elbows on the ice, hands raised to his face. Look closer: between his fingers is a damned soul he is chewing, Judas. All around, the traitors lie trapped in the ice like debris, and on a ledge to the right Dante and Virgil are two tiny white figures.

Bonus: Doré's other Lucifer

There is another Lucifer by Doré, far rarer, which does not appear among the 75 plates of the standard edition. The framing is completely different: no more ice cavern, the giant fills the whole image. Crouching, bearded and wild-haired, he glares straight at us, his claw-tipped wings spread behind him like a canopy. With both hands he holds Judas to his mouth, the traitor's legs dangling, head inside, just as Dante describes, and his two other faces can be glimpsed in profile. On the shore, Dante clings to Virgil. Where does this plate come from, and why was it left out? Its history remains to be written. Seen side by side, the two plates show two ways of imagining the same monster: the distant, almost pensive sovereign, and the devourer seen up close.

Out of Hell: "to see the stars" (Canto XXXIV)

74. The Hidden Road

To get out, Virgil climbs down Lucifer's hairy flanks with Dante clinging to his neck. At the centre of the earth they turn upside down, and from then on they are climbing. A narrow natural tunnel, carved by a stream, leads them to the other hemisphere. They walk without stopping to rest until, through a round opening, they glimpse "the beautiful lights of heaven".

75. And Thence We Came Forth to See the Stars

"Thus issuing we again beheld the stars." After 74 plates of darkness, Doré ends on the night sky. The same word, "stars", closes each of the three parts of the Divine Comedy, and Doré makes it the reward for the journey. The two tiny figures of the first plate are there again, still small against the world, but this time they are facing the light. The journey continues, in Purgatorio.

Continue the journey: Doré's Purgatorio is also in our catalogue, starting with Arachne, one of its most striking plates. Browse all our Gustave Doré engraving prints.

FAQ: Gustave Doré's Inferno

How many illustrations did Gustave Doré make for Dante's Inferno?

Doré made 75 full-page illustrations for the Inferno, published in 1861. With Purgatorio and Paradiso (1868), his Divine Comedy totals 135 plates.

When and by whom were Doré's Inferno illustrations published?

The book was published in Paris by Hachette in 1861, as a large folio. Doré, who was not yet 30, largely financed the edition himself because publishers considered it too costly. Its success launched his series of great illustrated classics.

What technique did Doré use?

They are wood engravings. Doré drew his compositions directly onto blocks of boxwood, then professional engravers, including Héliodore Pisan, cut them. The printed result is a black-and-white image with extremely subtle greys.

What are the nine circles of Hell?

1. Limbo, 2. Lust, 3. Gluttony, 4. Greed, 5. Wrath, 6. Heresy, 7. Violence, 8. Fraud (the Malebolge, ten ditches) and 9. Treachery (the frozen lake of Cocytus, with Lucifer at its centre).

Are Gustave Doré's illustrations in the public domain?

Yes. Doré died in 1883 and his works are in the public domain. Be aware, however, that some institutions set their own conditions for the commercial reuse of their digital scans.

What are the most famous plates of Doré's Inferno?

The Gate of Hell, Charon, Paolo and Francesca in the whirlwind, the forest of the Harpies, Geryon, Ugolino and Lucifer are among the most reproduced. They are also the ones that look most spectacular framed on a wall.

Doré's demons are only one side of the world's great bestiaries. If his monsters fascinate you, explore Japan's in our complete guide to yokai.