L’Enfer de Dante Alighieri. Avec Les Dessins de Gustave Dore. [Dante’s Inferno].

Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie, 1861. First Hachette edition with French text of Dore's magnificently illustrated edition of Dante's Inferno. Folio, bound in full morocco by Antoine Chatelin with elaborate Grolieresque gilt-decorated morocco onlays to the spine and panels, gilt turn-ins and inner dentelles, full gilt-decorated morocco doublures, watered silk endleaves stamped in gilt, marbled endpapers, illustrated with 75 full-page engravings by Gustave Dore including his striking frontispiece portrait of Dante. French translation by Pier-Angelo Fiorentino, accompanied by the text in Italian. In near fine condition. Housed in a custom clamshell box. An exceptional presentation linking two great artists of the 19th century. Widely considered the most important work of Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature, Dante's Divine Comedy takes as its literal subject the state of the soul after death and presents an image of divine justice meted out as due punishment or reward. The work was originally simply titled Comedia (so also in the first printed edition, published in 1472), Tuscan for "Comedy", and was later adjusted to the modern Italian Commedia. The adjective Divina was added by Giovanni Boccaccio, in reference to the work's subject matter and lofty style, and the first edition to name the poem Divina Comedia was that of Venetian humanist Lodovico Dolce, published in 1555 by Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari.