Portrait of Dante

Botticelli gives the poet Dante Alighieri the face posterity settled on - the jutting jaw, the great hooked nose, the laurel of the crowned poet over a red hood - in sharp profile against a bare ground, like a head struck on an antique medal. Dante had been dead nearly two centuries, so this is reverence, not likeness: Botticelli pored over the Divine Comedy and drew an exhaustive series of illustrations to it, and distills that devotion here into one severe image. The laurel claims immortality; the coin-like profile claims the authority of the ancients for Florence's supreme poet.