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Langdon, eager to share with his students the vibrant symbolic richness of Dante’s vision, sometimes taught a course on the recurring imagery found in both Dante and the works he had inspired over the centuries.
“Robert,” Sienna said, shifting closer to the image on the wall. “Look at that!” She pointed to an area near the bottom of the funnel-shaped hell.
The area she was pointing to was known as the Malebolge—meaning “evil ditches.” It was the eighth and penultimate ring of hell and was divided into ten separate ditches, each for a specific type of fraud.
Sienna pointed more excitedly now. “Look! Didn’t you say, in your vision, you saw this?!”
Langdon squinted at where Sienna was pointing, but he saw nothing. The tiny projector was losing power, and the image had begun to fade. He quickly shook the device again until it was glowing brightly. Then he carefully set it farther back from the wall, on the edge of the counter across the small kitchen, letting it cast an even larger image from there. Langdon approached Sienna, stepping to the side to study the glowing map.
Again Sienna pointed down toward the eighth ring of hell. “Look. Didn’t you say your hallucinations included a pair of legs sticking out of the earth upside down with the letter R?” She touched a precise spot on the wall. “There they are!”
As Langdon had seen many times in this painting, the tenth ditch of the Malebolge was packed with sinners half buried upside down, their legs sticking out of the earth. But strangely, in this version, one pair of legs bore the letter R, written in mud, exactly as Langdon had seen in his vision.
My God! Langdon peered more intently at the tiny detail. “That letter R … that is definitely not in Botticelli’s original!”
“There’s another letter,” Sienna said, pointing.
Langdon followed her outstretched finger to another of the ten ditches in the Malebolge, where the letter E was scrawled on a false prophet whose head had been put on backward.
What in the world? This painting has been modified.
Other letters now appeared to him, scrawled on sinners throughout all ten ditches of the Malebolge. He saw a C on a seducer being whipped by demons … another R on a thief perpetually bitten by snakes … an A on a corrupt politician submerged in a boiling lake of tar.
“These letters,” Langdon said with certainty, “are definitely not part of Botticelli’s original. This image has been digitally edited.”
He returned his gaze to the uppermost ditch of the Malebolge and began reading the letters downward, through each of the ten ditches, from top to bottom.
C … A … T … R … O … V … A … C … E … R
“Catrovacer?” Langdon said. “Is this Italian?”
Sienna shook her head. “Not Latin either. I don’t recognize it.”
“A … signature, maybe?”
“Catrovacer?” She looked doubtful. “Doesn’t sound like a name to me. But look over there.” She pointed to one of the many characters in the third ditch of the Malebolge.
When Langdon’s eyes found the figure, he instantly felt a chill. Among the crowd of sinners in the third ditch was an iconic image from the Middle Ages—a cloaked man in a mask with a long, birdlike beak and dead eyes.
The plague mask.
“Is there a plague doctor in Botticelli’s original?” Sienna asked.
“Absolutely not. That figure has been added.”
“And did Botticelli sign his original?”
Langdon couldn’t recall, but as his eyes moved to the lower right-hand corner where a signature normally would be, he realized why she had asked. There was no signature, and yet barely visible along La Mappa’s dark brown border was a line of text in tiny block letters: la verità è visibile solo attraverso gli occhi della morte.
Langdon knew enough Italian to understand the gist. “ ‘The truth can be glimpsed only through the eyes of death.’ ”
Sienna nodded. “Bizarre.”
The two of them stood in silence as the morbid image before them slowly began to fade. Dante’s Inferno, Langdon thought. Inspiring foreboding pieces of art since 1330.
Langdon’s course on Dante always included an entire section on the illustrious artwork inspired by the Inferno. In addition to Botticelli’s celebrated Map of Hell, there was Rodin’s timeless sculpture of The Three Shades from The Gates of Hell … Stradanus’s illustration of Phlegyas paddling through submerged bodies on the river Styx … William Blake’s lustful sinners swirling through an eternal tempest … Bouguereau’s strangely erotic vision of Dante and Virgil watching two nude men locked in battle … Bayros’s tortured souls huddling beneath a hail-like torrent of scalding pellets and droplets of fire … Salvador Dalí’s eccentric series of watercolors and woodcuts … and Doré’s huge collection of black-and-white etchings depicting everything from the tunneled entrance to Hades … to winged Satan himself.
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