When the Italian poet Dante Alighieri imagined hell in his famous work The Divine Comedy, he left a question for posterity. That hell would be a kind of funnel that would lead to eternal fire is certain. But souls would still need to go through stages or “circles” of great suffering; and no one knows how they would manage to leave one circle to enter another. This is the question that mathematicians and painters have tried, throughout history, to answer. One of them was the Italian painter Sandro Botticelli proposing that there be stairs between the levels. However, this would not be the best solution according to architect and Unicamp doctoral student Paulo de Tarso Coutinho Viana de Souza. For the researcher, the geometric figure of a spiral would be more functional and plausible. The idea was translated into a computer graphics video that is now available on the website Digital Dante, linked to Columbia University, in the United States.
According to Paulo de Tarso, the website is an academic platform whose editor is professor Teodolinda Barolini, considered one of the world's greatest experts on Dante Alighieri. In a letter sent to the doctoral candidate, she praised the researcher's work, stating that it offers “a modern and technically advanced way of bringing Dante's Inferno to life”. The researcher had been in contact with the teacher for two years. The film was designed for the website and also to compose his doctoral thesis, developed in the Visual Arts program at the Institute of Arts (IA) at Unicamp under the supervision of Haroldo Gallo. To build the spiral he used images from illustrator Gustave Doré, probably the greatest illustrator of the Divine Comedy.
In addition to the video of the spiral, the website included three more films created by the architect and which feature representations of Dante himself, Boticelli, and mathematician Antonio Manetti. In the text that precedes the videos, the title draws attention to “an architect’s vision of Dante’s hell”. The spiral imagined by Paulo de Tarso would be discontinuous at two points, where passages from one level to the other would occur. “I found in the geometric figure of the spiral the solution to Dante and Virgil's transit through hell because in the work Dante always awakens in another cycle, we never know how he crossed it”.
