Ever since the publication of Dante’s Divine Comedy, scholars and artists have tried to map the Inferno’s architecture, survey Purgatory, and measure their way across the spheres of Paradise. The first cosmographer of Dante’s universe was the Florentine polymath Antonio Manetti, whose unpublished research — which mathematically concluded that hell was 3246 miles wide and 408 miles deep — inspired the woodcuts used for a landmark 1506 edition of the poem. In 1588, a young Galileo weighed in, deriving Lucifer’s height and armlength (1200 and 340 meters respectively) and suggesting that the Inferno’s vaulted ceiling was supported by the same physical principles as Brunellesci’s dome. The scholarly tradition continued for centuries, culminating with the works of Michelangelo Caetani, who designed a series of maps and charts. These were published as The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri Described in Six Plates and appeared in two editions, an 1855 edition featuring hand-colored lithographs and an 1872 edition printed using an early form of chromolithography, deployed by an order of monks at Monte Cassino near Rome.

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.

Born in Rome, Michelangelo Caetani (1804–1882), Duke of Sermoneta and Prince of Teano, descended from a noble family and dedicated his life to sculpture, Dante scholarship, and public office, eventually serving as Governor of Rome after the city’s 1870 capture. In addition to these plates, he published, in 1852, a short work on canto 18 from “Paradise” and a longer 1881 commentary on the poem. But he was careful with his commentary, hesitant to conjecture, and described, in a 1903 collection of his Dante-related correspondence, how scholars should avoid “anything extraneous or useless to the clarity of the concept that Dante wished to express in his so simple and plain, equally sublime and poetic passage[s]”.

Below you can browse the hand-colored and chromolithographic plates from the two editions of Caetani’s The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. For more Dantean cartography, see our post on “700 Years of Dante in Art”.