This Painting Is Weirder Than It Looks. Here’s Why.

You probably recognize this painting, right? I don't think I've ever seen something so captivating, beautiful, and terrifying all at the same time. There's really nothing la- Um, hold on. There's something wrong. Just one moment here. There. So much better. What the? This piece is called Dante and Virgil by William Adolph Bouguereau. It was an attempt by the artist to make a name for himself by winning the highly coveted Prix de Rome scholarship, an award he had already failed to win two times before. But this time was different. This time, the claws were out. This time, he- Actually, he lost again. But Bouguereau let it all hang out with this one. Literally. He knew that in order to win, he needed to take his art to a whole nother level. And how did he go about doing this? He took us straight to hell. Oh my. Let's rewind a bit to Bordeaux, France in the year 1841. Bouguereau is 16 years old and has just enrolled in the Bordeaux Municipal Art School. He won basically all the awards at this school, so much so that the student body actually protested for the school to not give him any more prizes. And it's no wonder. He was super talented. I mean, just look at these sketches he did when he was just 17. Bouguereau didn't come from a wealthy family. His father only agreed to let him go to art school as long as his studies didn't lead him into a risky art career. So when Bouguereau graduated and moved to Paris to pursue a career in art, he had something to prove. To the world, to himself, but maybe most importantly, to his father. This pressure to weighed on him and the stress showed in his paintings. When he was 23, he submitted his first painting to the Paris Salon titled Equality Before Death. He left a note on the preparatory drawing of the piece that said, Equality, when the angel of death covers you with its shroud, your life will have been meaningless if you have not done some good unearthed. Bouguereau was haunted by the fear of failure. He quickly realized that to secure a successful art career, he needed to win the Prix de Rome scholarship, an award granted by the French government to young artists, giving them the opportunity to study in Rome. Bouguereau knew that in order to win, he had to try something unique, something unforgettable, something that would make everyone do a double take. Hello, I am Miss Deco. I will be your tour guide today as we make our way through hell. All right, follow me. Who on devil's red dirt is this? Can, can you please escort this man out? We can't have residents occupying the floors. We have to maintain our negative five star rating on help. Oh, he's dying. Well, that certainly complicates things. Our eyes are immediately drawn to two men engaging in combat in the center of the painting. Their skin and muscles look like they were carved out of stone. Bouguereau really spared no detail. And because of the way he rendered it, this might feel like the opposite of hell for some of you. The red haired man bends over the brown haired man. It looks like his teeth are sinking into the man's neck like a vampire. Although admittedly, we can't really see his teeth, so we can't fully know for sure. He thrusts his knee into the man's spine, stretching it like a rubber band. He holds his victim's arm in his right hand, as his left hand grips the side of man's abdomen so aggressively that a bit of blood drips from his broken flesh. And although this part of the painting is admittedly quite graphic, there's also something strangely mesmerizing about it. The brown haired man pulls at his combatants fiery hair as a final attempt to break free from his grasp, but it does no good. His fate seems to be staring him in the face. Like literally, he's probably going to look like this guy in a matter of seconds. So Dante must be a vampire trying to suck Virgil's blood then. I'm sure weirder things have occurred in the underworld, right? Wrong. Because this is Dante, and this is Virgil. Let me explain. This painting is clearly rooted in a Christian perspective, but is ultimately based on a portion of Dante Alighieri's epic poem, The Divine Comedy, called Inferno. In the Inferno, he details himself traveling through the nine concentric circles of hell with Virgil as his guide. Virgil was real life Dante's literary hero, though he died hundreds of centuries before Dante was even born, so they were never actually friends. Virgil acts as a voice of reason to help Dante understand what he's seeing and prevent him from indulging in his own morbid curiosity. It also apparently smells really bad in there, which might partially explain the look on Dante's face. We meet them in the eighth circle in a pit reserved for those who have committed fraud, and these are a couple of the fraudsters. Alchemist and heretic Capacchio and Gianni Schicchi. Schicchi secured his spot in the Inferno by impersonating a dead man named Buso Donati. Swiftly after Donati's death, his relatives hired Schicchi to impersonate him so they could rewrite his will and inherit his estate. To their surprise, Schicchi double-crossed them and stole the inheritance for himself, and because the relatives were part of this scheme, they couldn't do anything to stop him. If we look to the right of the painting, we catch a glimpse of what surrounds Dante and Virgil. Tortured bodies weave together, blanketing the background. A wide-eyed winged demon hovers overhead, looking at the travelers with a smug and satisfied look on his face. I really love how paradoxical this painting is. It's fast and slow, aggressive and gentle, serious but kind of weird. Art critic Theophile Gauthier wrote of this piece, Gianni Schicchi throws himself at Capacchio, his rival, with a strange fury, and Monsieur Bouguereau depicts magnificently through muscles, nerves, tendons, and teeth the struggle between the two combatants. There is bitterness and strength in this canvas. Strength, a rare quality. This piece was out of character for Bouguereau, and although the critics thought the painting was okay, it wasn't their favorite. Consequently, Bouguereau decided to move on from the whole saucy demonic thing. A few months later, he created the piece, Zenobia found by shepherds on the banks of the Araxes, that finally won him the Prix de Rome scholarship. And from that point on, Bouguereau would never make anything quite as bold as Dante and Virgil ever again. Don't get me wrong, Bouguereau's paintings were always stunning, but they kind of have this greeting card vibe going for them, with lots and lots of babies and nude women. I think it's safe to say Bouguereau was fighting his own demons when he made this piece, which could have been why he was able to inject so much passion and energy into this painting, because he was battling some of the same emotions Dante Alighieri would have felt when he wrote the Divine Comedy. Both men were going through their own identity crises. While Bouguereau was struggling with his career, Dante was going through his own internal faith struggle, and I can imagine these trying times may have felt a lot like this, or this, or maybe even like this. Bouguereau went on to have a wildly successful art career, so much so that at one point, it was said that his pieces would sell immediately, sometimes before he could even finish them. And for something absurd like three million dollars adjusted for inflation in today's dollars. He even made a comment that he couldn't go to the bathroom without losing money, though not everyone was a fan. Degas and other Impressionists coined the term Bouguerated when referring to overly finished paintings that they hated. Van Gogh said that Bouguereau was a well-paid painter of soft, pretty things, which coming from Van Gogh is a real slap in the face. These avant-garde artists hated Bouguereau's guts because to them, he represented the epitome of a traditional art world that rejected everything about them, and by the early 1900s, the broader public took the side of the Impressionists. Bouguereau's paintings were thought of as trash. They actually may have been thrown in the trash, since the whereabouts of many of them are still unknown. It's only been in recent decades that his art has started to become more popular again. Love him or hate him, you have to admit that Bouguereau's paintings are meticulous and, well, practically perfect, as if done by the hands of an angel. Ironic, I suppose. Oh my.