Botticelli's Drawings

Detail of Lucifer's second drawing by Botticelli from Inferno XXXIV

Below are a selection of Botticelli's drawings for Dante's Inferno. If you have never read it I highly recommend reading the entire Divine Comedy and pairing your reading with Yale University's Free Open Course, Dante in Translation. As for the drawings themselves, they are remarkably inventive, decorative, finely penned, and delicate. I appreciate how the decorative these are in a way that is quite different than the decorative qualities found in his paintings. He really is relying on a different set of visual grammar to produce the paintings, where color and volume are so important, compared to the simplicity of the black outlines of these drawings.