Franz von Bayros’s Inferno

Viennese artist Franz von Bayros (1866–1924) is unusual among illustrators in that his erotic art tends to be easier to see today than his less scandalous commissions. Such is the case with his illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, some of which I’d seen before but never as many as in a book which arrived recently at the Internet Archive. This is a home-made presentation that uses the Longfellow translation of the Inferno for the text. Bayros can’t compete with the sombre spectacle of Gustave Doré’s illustrations but he depicts some of the less dramatic moments that Doré’s full-page engravings avoid, while also placing a number of his drawings in the same monumental frames he liked to use for his pornographic art.