Blake and Dante …

… William Blake's 102 Illustrations of The Divine Comedy Collected in a Beautiful Book from Taschen | Open Culture. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Blake did not read the Divine Comedy as a medieval Catholic believer but as a visionary 18th and 19th century English artist and poet who invented his own religion. He “taught himself Italian in order to be able to read the original” and had a “ complex relationship” with the text, writes Dante scholar Silvia De Santis.