Saturday, October 11, 2014
Minos Picture
I wanted to talk about this picture of Minos, adjudicator of the damned, in class but I was worried about time constraints. I found this piece interesting because Doré portrays Minos as mostly human. In Dante's Inferno, Minos is both grotesque an beastly. The one characteristic of Minos that Doré decides to keep is the coiling tail, which wraps around Minos a certain number of times to symbolize the level of Hell in which they belong. Doré also shows some kind of light to be illuminating the figure of Minos. I think Doré depicted the image of Minos under this light to emphasize his importance in Hell, as the judge of each sinner in the line, which extends into the darkness in the background.
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2 comments:
It's interesting how grotesquely Dante portray's Minos. In Greek mythology, he is a king and son of Zeus, not a creepy creature with a tail. I think Dante does this to show the reader how a persons earthly sins can impact them in the afterlife. Minos was by no regard a friendly man: periodically, he would demand King Aegeus to select nine children for a Hunger-Games-like feeding of the Minotaur. The Minotaur itself would not have existed if it were not for the sinful actions of his wife; moreover, the labyrinth would not have existed had Minos not imprisoned the engineer Daedalus and demanded it's completion. For his egregious sins against humanity, in which he judged the fate of so many children in his life Minos exists in Hell as a disfigured judge of fates.
I think that your point Ross on the the light on Minos is meant to emphasize his importance in hell. It's almost as if Minos is sort of a "godly" figure in Hell, for he is the one who judges the sinners. Something else that stood out to be about Minos was his prominent muscles. The light seems to assist in helping to emphasize the muscles, showing corporeal form is essential to being a member of hell. His muscles help to show his type of authoritative figure since his body is a representation of how one is pure matter and purely physical in hell.
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