DIVINE COMEDY FROM OLEVANO TO JAPAN!

Can Olevano Romano, a very small town in Lazio, not far from my own very small native town, be connected with Japan via France and be a connecting thread to Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri? Oh yes! And I’m going to explain it in this post. Just be patient enough to read till the end.

Divine Comedy inspired many artists and writers to  create their own version of this famous and ancient  poem  .  Among them we also find the famous mangaka Go Nagai, who made his own version of the Divine Comedy in a splendid manga.

But let's quickly start by saying who Go Nagai is.

Go Nagai is a very famous Japanese mangaka, both in his homeland and in the rest of the world considered one of the most important mangakas ever; his works has marked the history of Japanese comics and brought great innovations.

Nagai was born on September 6, 1945 in Wajima in the Ishikawa prefecture; he began his career in 1965 and in 1970 he created Dynamic Production to produce and distribute his works. With his manga Mao Dante he began to work   with religious and demonic themes, later creating Devilman and a copy of Divine Comedy, both inspired by the illustrations of French Gustave Dore.

Thanks to him and to the creation of his manga Mazinger Z and the consequent production of the related anime, there is the introduction of the genre mecha, the genre whose protagonist is a robot guided by a human being inside it. After this extremely popular work, others were about the two previously mentioned themes. Later in years, Go Nagai's career took a curious turn: the mangaka, in addition to creating new works, devoted  himself to rewriting the works that made him famous.

Now I’d like to talk about famous French illustrator Gustave Dore, whom I have already mentioned above. He was  born on   6 January 1832 in Strasbourg, a painter and engraver known above all for his illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy. At six he showed that he was brought for drawing but at fifteen he began his artistic career by starting to publish “caricature" (sketches) for newspapers. In 1861 he published his illustrations of Dante’s Inferno and of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and three years later he illustrated The Bible. The creation of his engravings of the great classics ended in 1867. From 1870 he devoted himself completely to painting and sculpture creating new works but not getting the same success as in his illustrations.

Among Dore’s most famous and appreciated works we find his illustratrions of Dante’s Inferno and … here comes Olevano Romano! 

To draw the Dark Forest Doré was inspired just by Olevano Romano's Serpentara during one of his visits to Italy.

Here’s then the connection between Olevano, Doré and Go Nagai through Dante’s masterpiece, Divine Comedy!

Well, What do you think? Was this post interesting?  Thanks for reading till the end ;-)  

Akira

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