This two-panel painting from 1997 is based on the fourth canto from Dante's Inferno. The canto describes Christ's descent into hell to retrieve the Old Testament patriarchs and prophets. The painting depicts the plight of the Virtuous Pagans--the good poets, philosophers, politicians, and artists of antiquity, who are placed in eternal Limbo solely for the fault that they were born too soon to have known the Christian God. Their single punishment: To live for eternity with the knowledge that they are forever to be deprived of a truth toward which they aspired their entire lives; and to suffer the memory of the fleeting moment when, all too late, that goal was in their midst. For me, as I believe for Dante, this canto is the most tragic moment of the commedia, a tear in the robe of Divine Justice.

Left panel

oil on canvas

50"x34"

Right panel

oil on canvas

50"x 34"

In the foreground, a woman, echoing the pose of Rodin's Thinker, stares into the dark river Styx which offers no reflection. Another man lies prostrate next to her, hiding his eyes from the residual light of Christ's fateful appearance. Figures in the background recede into rock. The up-tilted perspective suggests that the viewer is likewise a denizen of hell, perhaps from an even lower circle.

In the foreground to the left, another figure conceals his eyes from Christ's residual Light. To the right, a woman trapped in stone strives for her lover who prostrates himself against its surface. In the center, a sculptor diligently presses on with his work even as his statues crumble and fragment around him. A violet twilight gradually fades over the canyon in the background.