It was followed by a staccato burst of screeching tires and car doors slamming. Langdon couldn’t imagine who would have created such an artifact, and yet, at the moment, this issue seemed secondary to a far more unnerving question.Īs Sienna stood with Langdon in the kitchen and pondered her next move, the unexpected roar of a high-horsepower engine echoed up from the street below. This artist had then stored the image on a high-tech projector sheathed in a freakishly carved bone. It had also, apparently, inspired yet another individual-a twisted soul who had digitally altered Botticelli’s famous painting, adding ten letters, a plague doctor, and then signing it with an ominous phrase about seeing the truth through the eyes of death. Now it seemed that Dante’s poetic vision of hell had not only influenced the most revered artists throughout history.
In addition to Botticelli’s celebrated Map of Hell, there was Rodin’s timeless sculpture of The Three Shades from The Gates of Hell … Stradanus’s illustration of Phlegyas paddling through submerged bodies on the river Styx … William Blake’s lustful sinners swirling through an eternal tempest … Bouguereau’s strangely erotic vision of Dante and Virgil watching two nude men locked in battle … Bayros’s tortured souls huddling beneath a hail-like torrent of scalding pellets and droplets of fire … Salvador Dalí’s eccentric series of watercolors and woodcuts … and Doré’s huge collection of black-and-white etchings depicting everything from the tunneled entrance to Hades … to winged Satan himself. Langdon’s course on Dante always included an entire section on the illustrious artwork inspired by the Inferno. Inspiring foreboding pieces of art since 1330. The two of them stood in silence as the morbid image before them slowly began to fade. “ ‘The truth can be glimpsed only through the eyes of death.’ ” Langdon knew enough Italian to understand the gist.
There was no signature, and yet barely visible along La Mappa’s dark brown border was a line of text in tiny block letters: la verità è visibile solo attraverso gli occhi della morte. Langdon couldn’t recall, but as his eyes moved to the lower right-hand corner where a signature normally would be, he realized why she had asked. “Is there a plague doctor in Botticelli’s original?” Sienna asked.
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