During the 1950s, Salvador Dali began working on a series of watercolor illustrations to accompany Dantes Divine Comedy. These illustrations, which follow the trajectory of Dante's journey through hell, purgatory and heaven, were commissioned by the Italian government to mark the 700th anniversary of Dante's birth in 1965. The prints consist of one hundred color woodcuts, which carefully recreate Dali's watercolors, capturing their subtle washes of color and delicate linear drawing. Dali's illustrations of Dantes Divine Comedy are far from a literal engagement with the medieval Italian text. Implementing a psychoanalytic lens, Dali extracts the metaphoric potential of Dante's poetry using aesthetic idiom to represent surrealist explorations of the unconscious and subconscious.