Gábor Lajta’s paintings, which are now on display, depict the first part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Inferno, in 12 large-scale paintings, covering the 12 main locations of the story.
In January 2024, the painter said of his plan:
“It’s crazy, it’s all I can think about since I got lost in the dark forest. In 2021, on the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, I decided to paint the Divine Comedy. Of course, what does it mean to paint it? It’s not that easy, because so much happens in a single canto of the Commedia that it would be impossible to turn it into a normal comic book. And yet, the inspiration came like a bolt of lightning, but I didn’t know why.
All I knew with any certainty was that yes, this is what I needed, and in fact I had always painted something like this, whether in the form of nudes, crowd scenes, cellar taverns, mythological or biblical scenes, which in some way – albeit darker, more dramatic and, in the strict sense of the word, more fatal – are already present in the Divine Comedy.