Another version of Dante

Drawings for Dante's Inferno by Rico Lebrun. The Kanthos Press, 1963.

Born in Naples, Italy, Italian American artist Rico Le Brun (1900-1964) emigrated to Springfield, Illinois to study stained glass technique, and to New York in 1924, where he worked in advertising and fashion illustration. He moved to California in 1938 where he taught at a number of institutions, including the Walt Disney Studios and UCLA. His drawings for the Inferno are networks of fine, light lines, conveying nevertheless a deep sense of darkness and tragedy, and in the case of “Ugolino,” of man's inhumanity to man. His illustrations for the Inferno were among his last projects.

John Ciardi was particularly fond of Lebrun's illustrations:

“For the last hundred years or so, most English readers of Dante have first become aware of him in those oversized, now flaky, brown volumes that contain the Doré illustrations. Because of the popularity of those volumes, Doré has become fixed in many minds as something like the official illustrator of Dante: mention the Inferno, and an English reader is likely to visualize exactly those dark Gothic landscapes with two hooded figures in the foreground, and the rest of the composition thronged by classic nudes, the men as muscular as Laocoön, the women voluptuous enough for a Sabine raid. The trouble is Doré did not understand Dante. Nor was he alone in that: Botticelli tried to illustrate Dante and came up with sketches so curlycued and rhythmically lilting that they might do for midsummernight's dance of fairies. Both men did what they understood how to do without taking the happy trouble to understand Dante. . . . it is only Rico Lebrun who succeeds in giving me a graphic Inferno, a series of interpretations that clearly declare their authority as graphic conceptions while faithfully rendering a sense of Dante. For -- despite all our habituated misunderstandings -- Hell is not a Gothic cave, nor is it a festival of dance rhythms, nor is it a series of monkish miniatures. It is a concept.”