 The journey of the mind to knowledge, the exploration of the bright and the dark sides of the human nature, the longing for home of the exile. Welcome to the British Library. Today we'd like to take you on a tour of our Dante collections. Born in 1265 in Florence, Italy, Dante Elighieri, poet, politician and philosopher, was exiled in 1302 and lived a wandering existence through Italy until the Settles di Ravenna, where he died in 1321, 700 years ago. His main work is the Divine Comedy. His account of a journey through the three realms of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. Dante is considered national poet in Italy, but is much more than that. The earliest manuscripts of the Divine Comedy appear almost immediately after Dante completed the poem in 1320. There are hundreds of copies that survived from the 14th and 15th centuries, and they're often decorated and sometimes extremely extensively. Here I have in front of me one of the earliest Dante manuscripts in our collection. It was made in northeast Italy in around 1340, so only a couple of decades after the poem was completed. It contains 261 small miniatures depicting events from the text. For the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, all books were written and decorated entirely by hand. This meant that they were extremely rare and valuable. Despite this, there was a huge manuscript tradition of copies of Dante's Divine Comedy. In this miniature you can see Dante and Virgil in the second circle of Hell, witnessing the whirlwind of the lustful. On the left you can see Dante and Virgil, and on the right you can see the whirlwind of lovers, which includes Paolo and Francesca. Another good example is this miniature in which we can see Virgil and Dante witnessing the treacherous imprisoned in a lake of ice. One of the reasons for the popularity of the Divine Comedy is because it was written in Italian rather than Latin, which was the language that a lot of literature was written in at the time. This meant that a lot more people could read it. This manuscript was made in Naples in around 1370, and it's an example of Southern Italian style art. The pictures are all in the lower margins of the pages, they're coloured in a distinctive colour wash style. So here is Dante and Virgil, and they're seeing Satan, who's devouring his victims. And at the bottom we've got the lake of frozen souls, and these are all people who betrayed their benefactors. Most of the medieval copies were commissioned by wealthy educated families and created in workshops by professional craftsmen. This is one of the finest Dante manuscripts ever made. It was probably made in Siena in Tuscany in around the 1440s, and it may have been made for Alfonso V, King of Aragon, Naples and Sicily. In the Paradiso Dante is guided through heaven by Beatrice, who's his ideal woman. On this page we can see Beatrice explaining to Dante about the solar system. Eventually Dante reaches the Empyrean, which is the highest heaven where God resides, and there he has a vision of a huge celestial rose, which is inhabited by all the souls in heaven. These medieval manuscripts with their sumptuous cycles of illustration were an enormous influence on the early printed editions. The British Library has one of the greatest collections of printed Dante editions in the world, ranging from the 15th century when printing was first introduced into Italy, right up into the 18th century and beyond. The collections of 15th and 16th century books are almost complete. You can trace the journey of the text over the various editions from the 15th to the 18th century, and also the other elements which were added to help readers, elements like illustrations, notes, commentaries and diagrams. What I'm looking at here is our copy of the very first printed edition in Italy in 1472, just eight years after the new technology of printing was introduced into Italy. It doesn't really have a title page. It begins with the text, but it tells you that it's starting. It says the comedy of Dante Alighieri of Florence is begins here, and so it does, and then it just continues. There are no illustrations and there's no commentary. A scribe would tell you that he'd finished writing the manuscript at the end, and printers did exactly the same. The amusing thing here is that the printer gives his name, he gives the date, and he tells you where he printed it, but he's copied the rhyming scheme of the poem itself. As I say, he names himself Io Maestro Johanni Nummeister, Johann Neumeister, John Neumeister, a German name, and that was very characteristic of early printing in Italy. The first printers in Italy were almost all Germans who brought the new technology into Italy. So the copy here is the first great illustrated edition of Dante's work. It was published in Florence in 1481 and it was designed to be monumental. Florence got a leading scholar to write a commentary on the poem, explaining the poem for readers, and they also got illustrations which were based on drawings by no less an artist than Sandro Botticelli. You can see around the text Landino's very long commentary. And there's an illustration right at the bottom of a page showing Dante in The Dark Wood, where he finds himself right at the beginning of the poem. The British Library Dante collections don't only include editions of the poem in the original Italian, but also many different translations in over 40 different languages, ranging from 16th century translations right up to the present day. One of the most interesting translations is the first complete English translation done at the beginning of the 19th century. Here is translation sparked interest in England in Dante's poem for the first time, particularly among romantic poets and artists. And we're very fortunate in having a copy which belonged to one of the great romantic poets of the time, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, annotated by him. It's interestingly not called the Divine Comedy, it's called Just the Vision, or Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. And here we have Coleridge's notes on the first canto to Paradiso, in which he also remarks on the excellence of Carey's translation and how few people will appreciate the excellence of the translation. Because of his choice to use the Italian language in his work and because of his hopes for an Italian unification with Rome as its centre, Dante has been considered the prophet of Italian unification. This extraordinary ability to paint with words has inspired artists around the world to visualise his verses. From the illuminated manuscripts to Renaissance artists such as Botticelli, from William Blake to Gustave Doree, the pre-Rapha Lights, Salvador Dali and Robert Trauschenberg, Japanese Mangas. For 700 years, artists have been inspired by the same work in different ways. Let's view some of these works together. In 1900, renowned publisher Rallinari gave young artists the opportunity to participate in a competition to illustrate Dante's work. The outcome is this edition that I have in front of me. This image from Inferno by Giulio Cambellotti describes a scene where the heretics are being punished. It's in the Liberty style. And the second one is from Alberto Martini, an artist very young who critics said was born to illustrate Dante because of his almost symbolist taste, very inspired by artists such as Odino Redone and Aubrey Beardsley. When the Italian government asked Spanish artist Salvador Dali on the occasion of the 700th anniversary of Dante's birth to produce 100 watercolours to illustrate the comedy, the Spanish painter seemed a strange choice. A Spanish surrealist who himself had rejected religion. The Italian government eventually cancelled this project but Dali continued producing his drawings which came out in 1964 and there's a edition that I would like to show you. So here, already from the first canto, you can see Dali's iconic style describing the first entering scene of the Divine Comedy with Dante approaching the dark woods where it gets lost in the middle of his life. So we have here the first line, nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, in the middle of my life, I find myself lost in a dark wood. I hope you've enjoyed our short tour. There's a lot more in our collections. Our work at a British library is to preserve these treasures for future generations and to continue acquiring more. In English, in Italian and in many other languages. If you'd like to find out more about our Dante collections why don't you search our online catalogue, view our digitized manuscripts, or come to our reading rooms.