The monument to Dante outside of Santa Croce Church in Florence, Italy.

Bust of Dante outside "Dante's House" (where Dante never lived) in Florence, Italy.

Images from Dante's "house" in Florence

Dante in Exile by Domenico Pelarlini

Dante espies Beatrice on Ponte Alle Grazie (Ponte Vecchio in background) by Henry Holliday Liverpool

Dante presenting Giotto to Guido by Giovanni Mochi

Dante reading

"The Gates of Hell" (unfinished) by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917): The figure at the center of the top panel, later to become a vastly popular independent sculpture known as "The Thinker," depacits Dante Alighieri contemplating the fate of mankind in hell. (Photographed in the sculpture garden of the Rodin Museum in Paris, the artist's collective where Rainer Maria Rilke had suggested Rodin set up his studio in the early twentieth century and where Rilke himself resided, as Rodin's secretary, for several years.)

The Gates of Hell

A cast of Rodin's "The Thinker" from the sculpture garden of the Danish Carlsberg Museum on Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard in Copenhagen -- originally an image from "The Gates of Hell."

The Thinker

Bronze medialion portrait of Dante as base on the Dante Pillar on Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard in Copenhagen. The medalion was sculpted by the Italian Libero Andreotti (1875-1933), and the pillar, sculpted by Einar Utzon-Frank (Denmark, 1888-1955), was erected in commemoration of the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante's death in 1922. Atop the pillar stands a sculpture of his "angel" Beatrice and along the base are inscribed the words "Here begins the new life" in reference to Dante's Vita Nuova.

Medalion portrait of Dante

Beatrice high aloft on her pedestal with -- a telephoto lens reveals -- her somewhat smeared visage. Dante watches flat up from the base of the pillar" ". . . I turned my eyes upward and saw here . . . Beatrice was my vision . . . but her image did not descend to me blurred by anything between us . . . (Canto XXXI)

Dante Pillar in Copenhagen		Beatrice