Dante’s Barque

2007
Bronze
350 x 500 x 100 cm (11 ft. 6 in. x 16 ft. 5 in. x 3 ft. 3 in.)
Venice, Italy

Floating some 200 meters offshore from the Fondamenta Nuove and 150 meters from Isola San Michele, island of San Michele - the city cemetery, also known as the Island of the Dead, two figures representing the poets Dante and Virgil stand in a traghetto, a humbler version of a gondola. They are presumably headed to the City of Dis, the capital of Hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy.  The cemetery is home to Horatio Brown, Igor Stravinsky, Ezra Pound, Sergei Diaghilev, and Joseph Brodsky. It is a point on land from which the path to the other world and, for certain souls, the way back may be traced with some clarity.

The sculpture’s precise coordinates are important, if only for their non-importance. Frangulyan reflected, “I chose the place purely compositionally, when it occurred to me that it was exactly the right place for my idea. Passing this place, I had somewhat of a vision that placing Dante’s Barque here and illustrating this very phenomenon at this very location would be the right thing to do. … The sculpture’s essence, its artistic “silhouette” just “fit” the city of Venice. This is my attitude (admiration) towards this city, my attitude towards Dante, my attitude towards creativity’’.

Dante's Barque is a unique work of sculptural art, in which George Frangulyan has managed to attain an exquisite melding of the language of modern sculpture with the idiom of the quattrocento. Frangulyan Dante's Barque was installed in 2007 coinciding with the Cherry Wood Festival and the 52nd Venice Biennale, Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind Subsequently.

The barque rests on a slightly submerged pontoon; its unique design allows it to move with the waves.