CAMILLE-FÉLIX BELLANGER (PARIS 1853-1923)
Scène de l’Enfer, du Dante
signé et daté 'Camille Bellanger. 1879.' (en bas, à droite)
porte une étiquette imprimée '32' (en bas, à gauche)
huile sur toile, sur sa toile d'origine, sans cadre
152 x 253 cm (59⁷⁄₈ x 99²⁄₃ in.)

Justin Bellanger (1833-1917), écrivain et poète, père de l'artiste, Provins, jusque 1917.
Collection particulière, Seine-et-Marne.

J. Davrigny, 'Aperçu du salon', Le Phare, 15 juin 1879, 2e année, 2, XXXVI, p. 361.
M. Vacherot, 'XVIme Exposition de la Société des Amis des Arts à Pau. 1880', L'Écho des Pyrénées, 3 mars 1880, 7e année, 906, s. p.
J. Martin, Nos peintres et sculpteurs. Graveurs, dessinateurs, Paris, 1897, p. 39.
E. Bénézit, Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs, graveurs, Paris, 1999, p. 47.

Paris, palais des Champs-Elysées, Salon, 1879, n°200 (comme 'Scène de l’Enfer, du Dante').
Pau, Exposition de la Société des Amis, 1880, n°32 (selon M. Vacherot, 1880, voir infra).

CAMILLE-FÉLIX BELLANGER (1853-1923), SCÈNE DE L’ENFER, DU DANTE, OIL ON CANVAS, UNLINED, UNFRAMED, SIGNED AND DATED (LOWER RIGHT), BEARS A LABEL (LOWER LEFT)

This previously unrecorded painting by Camille-Félix Bellanger (1853-1923) plunges us into one of the most terrifying episodes of the Divine Comedy: the seventh bolgia of the eighth circle of Hell, as Dante (1265-1321) describes it in Cantos XXIV and XXV of the Inferno. In this chasm are punished the thieves, condemned to wander naked, terror-stricken, amid a multitude of serpents. The Florentine poet describes a terrible mass of reptiles of countless species, among which people run, filled with dread, their hands bound behind their backs with those same serpents, which drive their tails and heads into the damned.

The present painting conveys this vision with great force: a male body thrown to the ground, in the grip of several reptiles, whilst to the right faces emerge from the shadows, their features ravaged by terror and eternal punishment. The dark palette, the rocky background and the livid lighting lend the scene the suffocating atmosphere of the infernal bolgias.

Born in Paris in 1853, Camille-Félix Bellanger was a pupil of Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889) and William Bouguereau (1825-1905) at the École des Beaux-Arts. He was awarded the second Prix de Rome in 1875, four years before the presentation of this Scene from Hell, at the Salon. With this infernal scene, Bellanger embarks upon an ambitious project to treat one of the most demanding subjects in literature with the anatomical mastery inherited from his teachers; the brilliance of the male nude and the virtuosity of the rendering of flesh are unquestionable.

This painting enters into direct resonance with another major work by the artist, his Abel, preserved in the Musée d'Orsay (Paris, RF 142) and acquired directly from the artist. There too one finds a large recumbent male nude, vanquished, offered to the viewer's gaze in all the vulnerability of the flesh. The comparison reveals a constant in the artist's approach: the naked male body as a space for the expression of fate, suffering and the tragic sublime. Where Abel questions the first murder and innocence destroyed, the present work plunges the viewer into eternal damnation; these are two facets of the same meditation on the human condition in the face of violence and death.

The founding work of Italian literature, to which Daniel Thierry has recently devoted a publication (see D. Thierry, La Divine Comédie. L'Univers de Dante, Montreuil, 2025), enjoyed an immense iconographic fortune in the 19th century. In France, it was Delacroix's Barque of Dante (1798-1863) at the Salon of 1822 that inaugurated with brilliance this Romantic fascination with the depths of Hell. Bellanger participates in this tradition whilst giving it, in 1879, a more physical and more brutal dimension, characteristic of the academic aesthetic of the second half of the century: less Romantic sweep, more anatomical truth and visual violence.

This hellish composition was kept by the artist's father, Justin Bellanger (1833-1917), writer and poet, until his death, and appears today for the first time at auction.