Steve Bell, the Tories and Dante/Dore’s visions of Hell

I absolutely love the Internet. Given a focus, you can discover the most extraordinary stuff.

I often check out Steve Bell’s cartoons in The Guardian. He is a gentle giant of a man (I met him several times while working briefly at The Guardian) but his political cartoons are, to my mind, probably the best in this country at the moment. He has great, dark visions and wit and – crucially – the great skill to realise them.

Today’s cartoon is no exception. Yesterday, Michael Howard officially stood down as leader of the Conservative party, leaving behind the usual clamouring Tories candidates tasting the scent of power with their forked tongues.

Bell came up with a striking cartoon with Howard entering a flaming tomb while being applauded by dead-eyed Tories – all the main candidates arranged at the front. I’ve stuck it above and you can also buy a copy of it on Steve Bell’s website. Bell has repeatedly used vampire imagery around Michael Howard – something that is almost certainly due to a famous attack by a fellow Conservative MP that he had “something of the night” about him.

Bell’s cartoon a typically strong image but I was intrigued by a caption at the bottom which read: “Apologies to G. Dore – Pisan.”

Clearly Bell had used some famous illustration (of which I am utterly ignorant) as inspiration. And so I embark on a Net search to find out what it was – and how come he’d decided to go with it.

Didn’t take long. Gustave Dore lived between 1832-83 and by all accounts appears to have been one of the greatest illustrationists of all time. His dramatic, imaginative and dark pictures are available for view on the Web.

H. Pisan (don’t know his first name) was an engraver that worked closely with Dore to make plates of his illustrations – thereby making mass production of them possible.

The two worked together on several legendary works of fiction, most famously Cervantes’ classic satire Don Quixote and Dante’s (Dante Alighieri) Divine Comedy.

It is from the Divine Comedy that the sketch Steve Bell used as inspiration comes. Dante lived in the early 1300s and his Divine Comedy, in case you don’t know, is an epic and classic poem of the ilk of the Iliad and so on. It tales the tale, oddly enough of classic poet Virgil showing Dante through Hell and Purgatory (Dante gets his perfect woman Beatrice to show him round Paradise).

The illustration at the heart of this (pasted below) is of the sixth of the nine circles of hell, dedicated to heretics trapped in flaming tombs. Disbelievers banished to enclosed painful existences away from everyone else.

As the sixth circle, we’re talking pretty far into Hell, two-thirds in. Which, if you think about it, is probably just about right for politicians. Only frauds, murderers and TV personalities in that order get a closer seat at Satan’s sideshow.

Here is that pic:

The other illustrations are pretty extraordinary. And, rather pleasantly, you can buy them all online in a book called “The Dore Illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy” – available from Amazon now for just £8.36. (Somehow I always end up buying a book from Amazon whenever I research something.)

And there you have it, another delightful little trawl around the Internet. The discovery of a work of art, another book soon to arrive in my lounge and a small insight into the work methods of Britain’s best political cartoonist.