Hell (also known as The Woeful Realm, L'inferno in Italian) is a realm of the afterlife where the unrepentant mortals who committed sin are sent to be tortured as punishment for eternity. In the early 14th Century, Italy, a patchwork of city states with various external imperial powers vying for influence, was also a patchwork of different languages. The Barque of Dante (French: La Barque de Dante), also Dante and Virgil in Hell (Dante et Virgile aux enfers), is the first major painting by the French artist Eugène Delacroix, and is a work signalling the shift in the character of narrative painting, from Neo-Classicism towards Romanticism. In the same canto, he adds, also via James, “Ah, Genoese, you that know all the ropes/Of deep corruption yet know not the first/Thing of good custom, how are you not flung/Out of this world?” Of the mythical King Midas he says: “And now forever all men fight for air laughing at him.” There has never been a more artful master of the insult.William Bouguereau’s Dante and Virgil from 1850 shows how vivid and image-rich Dante’s storytelling is (Credit: Alamy)There’s also never been an imagination more attuned to inventive forms of punishment. And, setting the stage for the Renaissance and its rebirth of Classical learning, Dante’s idea of Hell draws from Aristotle’s view that reason is the most important thing in life – which would be the later idea in Protestantism that an individual’s reason is their path to salvation. Two centuries later, Protestant leaders would advocate that reading the Bible in your own vernacular meant that you could give it your own individual understanding, undermining the idea that salvation is possible only through the Roman Church – something Dante himself had already done by outright inventing elements of the cosmology he presents in The Divine Comedy.‘There is no greater sorrow than happiness recalled in times of misery’ – this line from Francesca, painted by Ary Scheffer, channels the grief Dante felt in exile (Credit: Alamy)He had the presumption to fill in what the Bible leaves out. Jorge Luis Borges said The Divine Comedy is “the best book literature has ever achieved”, while TS Eliot summed up its influence thus: “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. Satan himself is referred to as Dis, another name for Pluto, the god of the underworld.Dante’s vision of Hell has inspired countless artists – from Botticelli to the videogame designers behind a 2010 adaptation of the Inferno for Playstation and Xbox (Credit: Alamy)And real-world history is placed alongside divinity too: who is Satan eternally devouring? Literary ambition seems to have been with Dante, born in 1265, from early in life when he wished to become a pharmacist. Dante is indeed suggesting that Julius Caesar may have been on the same level of importance as Jesus.