Drawings by Sandro Botticelli for Dante's Divina commedia : reduced facsimiles after the originals in the Royal Museum, Berlin, and in the Vatican Library
A facsimile volume of Sandro Botticelli's pen drawings illustrating Dante's Divine Comedy, published in London by Lawrence and Bullen in 1896, reproducing originals held in Berlin and the Vatican Library and edited by Friedrich Lippmann with Baccio Baldini. The plates show swirling, densely packed groups of figures drawn in fine uncoloured outline, some on rough ground, some on ships or in crowds, with several pages turned sideways. A designer could take from them the energy of crowded contour line and the way figures swirl and tumble across a page.
