Dante's Inferno

Two people looking down on someone rising from a grave. They are near an ATM and outside of a bank on a street.
A scene at night with a figure seeming to rise from an open grave while two individuals wearing robes look down upon him from the ground above.

Sandow Birk (b. 1964), illustrator
Marcus Sanders, translator
San Francisco: Trillium Press, 2003
Booth Family Center for Special Collections
Rare Books 
General LC ; PQ4315.2 B46 2003 

Inspired by Gustave Doré, Farinata from Dante's Purgatorio
Image source: The Doré Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy (New York: Dover Publications, 1976), p. 30.

Sandow Birk teamed with writer Marcus Sanders to reinterpret Dante Alighieri’s 14th-century masterpiece The Divine Comedy into a contemporary, urban setting. In their trilogy, the Inferno is set in Los Angeles, Purgatorio in San Francisco, and Paradiso in New York.  Sanders’ present day vernacular includes slang words while Birk’s images are derived from the classic 19th-century illustrations of Gustave Doré. The page shown here is from Canto X, lines 34-36. In this canto, Dante travels to the sixth circle of hell with Virgil where he encounters the “shade” of his political enemy Farinata rising from his tomb. This circle of hell is populated by Heretics who do not believe the soul of man resides within his body.