With his 100-part poem, "The Divine Comedy," Italian poet Dante Alighieri created a masterpiece. Almost 200 years later, around 1481, the Italian artist Sandro Botticelli began illustrating the work.

Botticelli's illustrations, many of which are now housed in the Berlin Museum of Prints and Drawings, show Virgil leading the young Dante through hell. Both experience how the damned have to endure torture. Whores and pimps pedal around in a river of excrement and desperately scrape the dirt out of their hair. 

Dante asks one of the sufferers what he has done. Another scene seems so terrible that Dante covers his eyes. Botticelli's drawings are so accurate that they continue to fascinate artists and cartoonists to this day.

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