The National Museum of Castel Sant'Angelo preserves the almost complete series of prints engraved by Bartolomeo Pinelli between 1824 and 1826 to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy , published in Rome by Giovanni Scudellari. The printing was carried out for the retrospective exhibitions organized in Castello in 1911 on the occasion of the Universal Exposition, using the original matrices still owned by the Central Institute for Graphics.

The etchings on display capture the most significant episodes of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise , accompanied by Dante's triplets, revealing "frankness of design", "happiness of invention" and "truth of moves and affects", as reported by a positive review of the time. The series shows the artist's ability to deal with cultured and literary themes, overcoming the usual popular and vernacular subjects that had made him famous. The enthusiastic admirers of the work praised its "sublime simplicity", seeing in Pinelli the ability to feel beauty with the heart "before even having studied it with the mind".

Pinelli's work is part of a rich trend of rediscovery of Dante's poem that runs through romantic Europe between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, when a new sensibility recognizes in the Comedy the authentic expression of a powerful individual feeling, the " sublime ". Pinelli therefore follows in the wake of those artists, such as William Blake, Johann Heinrich Füssli, John Flaxman and Felice Giani , who translate Dante's inventions into grandiose images with a strong visual impact.

Pinelli's work immediately met with considerable critical success, but it did not have an adequate diffusion. In the Roman context, the complete series is owned only by the Capitoline Library, the Academy of San Luca, the Central Institute for Graphics and the Library of the Besso Foundation. The Castel Sant'Angelo series has 143 prints out of 145. The two that complete it, which did not reach us for unknown reasons, have been reprinted and generously made available for the exhibition by the Central Institute for Graphics.