Scope and Contents

Reproduction of an Etruscian bronze depicting the liver and gall bladder found in 1877 in Piacenza. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents This beautifully produced catalogue was published for the exhibition in the Olin Library at Washington University by the curator, scholar and Head of Special Collections, Kevin Ray. It coincided with the exhibition and symposium "The Dual Muse: The Artist as Writer and the Writer as Artist" organized by the Gallery of Art and the International Writers Center. The Sackner Archive lent nine handwritten and typed bound volumes of Phillips' Dante manuscripts, two silkscreen prints, eleven collages from the "Dante Diary," and a typewriter work on backing paper incorporating all the words of Phillips' first translation of the Inferno. Kevin Ray contributed an illuminating essay tracing the history of translations and illustrations of Dante, including the works of Botticelli, Gustave Dore, Blake and Rauschenberg. Ray writes that in the Tom Phillips' Inferno, the artist, incorporates "much of the method he developed in creating A Humument, 'treating' an existing text and making of it...