MATERIAL: Patinated bronze
SIZE: 72 x 35 x 30 cm
Sculpture signed

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The author writes about his work as follows:
The portrait shows Dante looking at the apple blossom with melancholy and bitterness. The flower is broken and it will bear no fruit. Likewise, Dante’s love for the prematurely deceased Beatrice was fruitless. His love was never fulfilled. In return, it impregnated his imagination and increased his creative powers. His personal suffering became a source of inspiration for the work that changed the history of our culture. The portrait is also an image of a scene from “Divine Comedy” – the poet, wandering around the 7th circle of hell, encounters souls enchanted in living trees and, at Virgil’s insistence, tears a twig from one of them:

“Break the branch with the curve,

And you will know your mistake ». I am soon impatient

He stretched out his hand and the branch pinched.

«Why are you breaking me?» suddenly the stump cried out;

He went black with blood and spoke again screaming:

«Why are you jerking my heart so wild?

We were people, we are trees

You could have more pity on us,

Even if we were vermin’s souls ”.

Like one end lit up,

And the other one hisses, the chest has a green blade.

Breathing air that warms in her

So blood and words came from the trunk of that tree.

And I dropped the twig under my feet,

Standing like a man, they became troubled with fear. ”

DANTE ALIGHIERI, The Divine Comedy, trans. Julian Korska, song XII, pp. 56-57