Artist Spent 7 Years Hand-Lettering & Illustrating a New Divine Comedy
Just in time for the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death
I first met George Cochrane in 2016.
At that point I had spent over 9 years in the luxury bookselling business, selling medieval illuminated manuscript facsimiles through my business, Facsimile Finder.
In today’s day and age, most illuminated manuscripts live behind closed doors in private collections or libraries. The most historically important books lie safely secured behind bullet-proof glass. For the sake of preserving our culture, access to the physical books is nigh impossible.
This is where facsimiles can step in. They are a fascinating medium to bridge the gap between the reader and the original book. Personally, being able to provide university libraries and collectors with high-end copies of these culturally important books is very rewarding.
It was clear, however, from George’s first email to me that he was different from most of the clientele I was used to.
George was not just a collector, nor was he a special collections librarian, or even affiliated with a library — George was an artist on a life mission. He also had an intense passion for Dante and the Divine Comedy, similar to that of my fellow Italians.
George first inquired about how to get his hands on a copy of the Dante Poggiali facsimile. The original was considered to be the first illustrated Divine Comedy ever produced before 1350, very soon after Dante’s death in 1321. This was important to George, as there is no known autographed copy of the Divine Comedy by Dante’s own hand.
At the time, George was working on a modern take of Dante’s Inferno: hand-lettered, beautifully illustrated, printed letterpress, and hand-bound. For this work, he needed to study the source material.
The following year, after trying to get his hands on every version of the Divine Comedy he could find, and over 1,600 hours of hand-lettering and illustrating later, George’s Inferno was finally published.
But George confided in me — he felt his mission was incomplete.
The Divine Comedy is, after all, not only considered to be the most pre-eminent work in Italian literature, but also one of the greatest triumphs of literature in the world.
How could he pay proper homage to such a masterpiece? George could only see one way forward— to complete the entirety of the Divine Comedy in original Italian. Beyond this, he wanted Facsimile Finder (based in Italy at the time, now in San Marino) to publish the completed work.
To say the least, I was not completely on board with the concept at first.
I was solely a bookseller, and my business had yet to venture into actually publishing a book. But George was persistent, and our relationship had grown into a solid friendship since that first email. I needed to know more.
Who was George, and why did he love the Divine Comedy so much?
I will never forget the first conversation I had with George about how his love for the Italian language and the Divine Comedy took hold.
He took me back to his high school days.
After disastrously failing his French class, George was told he had no capacity to ever learn a living language. Placing George in Latin class and hoping for the best, his teachers couldn’t have imagined the results. A few years later, George took up Italian and Spanish, and using Latin as his baseline, he began to overcome his supposed handicap.
Following this life changing experience, George met Dante Alighieri for the very first time. During his junior year abroad in Florence, Italy, George purchased his first copy of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
While he sensed the greatness of the Commedia, he had a hard time understanding the depth of its immortal message, and quickly gave it up.
He told me, “Well, I bought a copy that had very poor commentary, the most minimal notes you could possibly imagine. Of course there was no translation, and it was completely hopeless.”
But Dante kept re-entering George’s life like a flame that wouldn’t go out.
At the time, he was doing research for his graphic novel about Homer’s Odyssey, and began reading author James Joyce. Joyce swore that Dante was a greater writer than Shakespeare himself. George shared with me in astonishment as he recounted this memory:
“How can someone say that anybody’s better than Shakespeare? We’re trained to believe and understand that Shakespeare is the maximum. Maximum sophistication, complexity of language, all this stuff… and here James Joyce comes along saying Dante is better. Impossible!”
And so George was perplexed, and decided to give Dante another try.
Finding his current copy still impossible to read, George sought out a number of different copies to compare. And as he delved deeper into the world of Dante, he quickly fell in love.
His new obsession led him to examine the complexities of Dante’s language, as well as to carry out extensive iconographic research. I was able to help him with by providing key facsimiles. With over 800 surviving manuscripts of the Divine Comedy, and several of them enriched by magnificent painted scenes, the source material he had to work with was substantial to say the least.
So, George became familiar with seven centuries of art inspired by Dante’s poem. These included giants like Michelangelo, Botticelli, Gustave Doré, and William Blake, but also lesser known artists such as Manfredo Manfredini, Ebba Holm, and Antonio Zatta.
Fast forward to 2019–2020, George and I had officially teamed up to publish his new Divine Comedy manuscript. We had spent the last two years collaborating at art library conferences (ARLIS)and exchanging ideas about the importance of his work for Italy and the world.
George is originally a comic book/graphic novel artist. He wanted to create a graphic novel inspired version of the Divine Comedy that would make Dante’s poem contemporary through art, and his message approachable for younger generations. A Divine Comedy that a younger George could understand.
As an Italian, I’m proud of our beautiful language, which was first formalized by Dante through his epic poem.
Being impressed with the deep cultural and iconographic research George had done to bring his work together, and what this work would mean for Italy, how could I possibly say no?
Not long after agreeing to the project, George and I learned that 2021 would be the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death.
An artistic vision took hold: to complete and publish George’s masterpiece on this very special anniversary, in both English and Italian.
We quickly began planning;
How could we publish such a magnificent work?
What would the cover look like?
Which colors should we use?
What type of paper?
Which press?
How long would it take for George to finish hand writing all 350,000 characters that make up the Divine Comedy in his own invented comic font?
Not to mention the illustrations decorating every page?
We reached for every book on book design we could get our hands on, and the work began!
As our team worked out the details of book design, George kept to a rigid schedule like a medieval monk. He woke before dawn to scribe his manuscript pages. Each page took him about 1.5 hours to complete.
George always said to me, “The way Dante’s work first appeared was in medieval manuscripts, so handwriting is a part of the way that his poem had first appeared.”
George sees Dante’s work as inseparable from the handwritten letter. He places importance on the form that its first readers would have experienced it in.
He would write every single day for months, as many lines as he could complete before going to work. George copied the entire poem while his normal life was going on.
But as George wrote and began illustrating the text, our team was seeking ways to achieve a faithful reproduction of his hand written type design. It was only in Italian. How could we use the same design for an English printing as well?
I ended up approaching Alessio D’Ellena, Type Designer and Graphic Designer. He works in Milan as a professor and lecturer on Type Design, Lettering and Typography at Bauer Milan, EID Turin, and Naba Milan.
Alessio was intrigued by the opportunity to reproduce the variety and richness of a personal writing system. Thankfully, he agreed to work with us! As an Italian, Alessio was also excited to play a role in such a challenging work that represents a text so important to Italian culture.
For readers of George’s new Divine Comedy, once published, the goal is that it will transport them to the time of Dante. Not just through the artistic expression inspired by hundreds of years of art, but also through the written word found on every page.
I stand in awe at the work it has taken to get to this point.
George faced the odds of learning Italian in order to understand the Divine Comedy in its original language.
He took 7 years to hand write all 350,000 characters of the poem, and illustrate every page.
For me and my team, we have ventured out to try and publish our very first volume. It has truly been a journey like none other.
The Divine Comedy — The New Manuscript is now on Kickstarter!
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