Canto XIX: The Simoniacs painting by Salvador Dali?

Question

http://www.meaus.com/106-dali-inferno-4.htm
what can you say about the picture?
some interpretations please. thanks

Answer 1

Dali's Dante is impressionistic. It simplifies and modernizes imagery from the text, but at the same time incorporates representational figures, recognizable to the reader of the Inferno.

In the first place, one ususally sees the poet Dante and his guide Virgil, often at the margin of the design, their shadows elongated as if reflected by the consuming fires of hell. In this case the figure of one is shown at the center foreground with his shadow, but only the shadow of the other. They are looking at fellow mortals caught in a huge stone, only their limbs extending from the mass. Though we see only their legs (and in one case an arm), we can tell they have been larger men than Dante and Virgil, potentially more heroic, but damned by their pride and greed.

Simony is a churchman's sin, the attempt to purchase preferment within the church, It derives from the account in Acts 8:9-24, which tells of the effort of the sorcerer Simon Magus (or "magician," like those other "magi" who sought the birth of the Christ child) to purchase the miracle-working power of the Apostle Paul. Simoniacs in Dante's era would have attempted to bribe their way into higher echelons within the church hierarchy or they would have been involved in the buying and selling of pardons for sins.

They would have used their mouths to deceive, their heads to work out their schemes, and their hands (figuratively) to reach out for honors and awards, or cash emoluments. Hence, those parts of their bodies have become encased in stone. Only their legs distend from the stone, but they can no longer escape. Pilgrimages that might better have occupied their time are no longer possible. They cannot run from what they became. Their "prayers" have been granted and they are caught "hard-and-fast" in the positions they deserve. They are simoniacs in hell.

Their legs seem to be writhing or are paralyzed, exhausted. The most ironic image of a simoniac's limb is the one arm, at the lower left corner of the stone. It has been a strong, potentially powerful arm, but it no longer has a palm outstretched for rewards or a fist closed upon its loot, but is half open as if in surrender.

The poet stands robed before the gigantic stone, tall and erect, but dwarfed by the huge limbs of these greedy mortals, whose ambition made them giants but whose arrogance led to their damnation.

At least that's my intepretaton of this curious design. The soft pastel colors show how distant we are from this morbid, grotesque scene. Dante and Virgil stand apart frome the sufferers in the designs (and in the poem); Dante's poem kept his readers even more distant from actual experience of the horrors; Dali's art and several centuries of rationalism and religious skepticism create even a greater removal for the modern reader/viewer.

But the agony of arrogance and greed, if anything, seems all the more threatening. Those strong arms and legs demonstrate the discrepancy between the power for good these mortals might have achieved and the uselessness to which they are condemned for eternity by their deceitful, self-centered grasping. Those lines are still vivid though the colors seem almost to have faded with time.