Art of the ‘Divine’
When Dante Alighieri wrote his epic poem the “Divine Comedy” early in the 14th century, most Europeans believed in the literal truth of his three realms of the dead: hell, purgatory, and heaven. Those three still play a metaphorical role and often accurately describe modern reality, from the hellish to the heavenly. Recently, Dante’s realms found one new life in “The Divine Comedy,” a three-part exhibit at Harvard through May 17, a joint project by the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) and the Harvard Art Museums. The exhibit plays with the notion that the three have parallels in the present-day concepts of history, mind, and cosmos. History: Outside the Northwest Science Building on Oxford Street is a dramatic reminder that this field is sometimes hell. “Untitled” is a warren of nine towering cubes hung with 5,335 identical backpacks. Each one, with its muted checkerboard of greens and grays, represents a schoolchild killed...