During the 1950s, Salvador Dalí began working on a series of watercolor illustrations to accompany Dante’s 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 Dalí’s watercolors, capturing their subtle washes of color and delicate linear drawing. Dalí’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy are far from a literal engagement with the medieval Italian text. Implementing a psychoanalytic lens, Dalí extracts the metaphoric potential of Dante’s poetry using aesthetic idiom to represent surrealist explorations of the unconscious and subconscious.