Poster William Bouguereau - Dante and Virgil, 1850

William Bouguereau (1825-1905)
Dante and Virgil, 1850
Oil on canvas. H. 280,5; L. 225,3 cm
Paris, musée d'Orsay
Dation, 2010.
©Photo musée d'Orsay, dist. GrandPalaisRmn / P. Schmidt

Having failed on two occasions to win the Prix de Rome (1848 and 1849), Bouguereau was hungry for revenge. His early...

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William Bouguereau (1825-1905)
Dante and Virgil, 1850
Oil on canvas. H. 280,5; L. 225,3 cm
Paris, musée d'Orsay
Dation, 2010.
©Photo musée d'Orsay, dist. GrandPalaisRmn / P. Schmidt

Having failed on two occasions to win the Prix de Rome (1848 and 1849), Bouguereau was hungry for revenge. His early submissions to the Salon reveal this fierce desire to succeed. After his ambitious Equality before Death (1849), the young man aimed to create an impression once again. He put forward an even larger painting inspired by Dante whose work was much loved by the Romantics and who captured all its dramatic beauty. This painting was inspired by a short scene from the Inferno, set in the eighth circle of Hell (the circle for falsifiers and counterfeiters), where Dante, accompanied by Virgil, watches a fight between two damned souls: Capocchio, a heretic and alchemist is attacked and bitten on the neck by Gianni Schicchi who had usurped the identity of a dead man in order to fraudulently claim his inheritance.

Everything in this painting underlines the feeling of terribilita and horror: a theme to which Bouguereau would never again return.

© GrandPalaisRmnCréations, Paris 2026

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