Dante and Virgil

Dante opens his Inferno lost in a dark wood. He tries to climb toward a hill lit by the rising sun, and three beasts drive him back, a quick leopard with a spotted hide, a lion with its head held high, and a lean she-wolf. Then the ghost of the Roman poet Virgil appears and offers to lead him out by another road, down through Hell. Corot set that meeting under trees on a canvas more than two and a half metres tall. Dante, in a black robe and a red hood, shrinks back with a hand at his chest. Virgil, in white with a laurel wreath, points the way. The wolf snarls at the left, the lion comes out of the shadows at the right, and the animal crouching in front of the lion has stripes, a tiger in place of the poem's spotted cat. Only a strip of pale dawn sky shows between the trunks at the left. Corot sent the picture to the Salon of 1859. On 5 April that year, at the home of his friend the painter Constant Dutilleux, he drew the composition in charcoal on a small sheet, apparently from memory, to show his friend what it looked like, and Dutilleux wrote the date on the back. That drawing is now in the Louvre.