Dante's Inferno - Level 4

In which the misers and the spendthrifts spend all eternity fighting each other using heavy weights.

Canto 7
(28) "They struck against each other; at that point,
each turned around and, wheeling back those weights,
cried out: 'Why do you hoard?' 'Why do you squander?'
...
(53) "The undiscerning life that made them filthy
now renders them unrecognizable.

For all eternity they'll come to blows:"
...
(58) "Ill giving and ill keeping have robbed both
of the fair world and set them to this fracas—
what that is like, my words need not embellish.

Now you can see, my son, how brief's the sport
of all those goods that are in fortune's care,
for which the tribe of men contend and brawl;"

With my illustrations for the inferno, my primary intent is to tell a version of the story that emphasizes the degree to which human beings create their own punishments and turn themselves into monsters by behaving as such—thus, people design their own hell in this lifetime.

For this illustration of the fourth circle of hell, I took the symbolism of the poem out of the 14th century and put it beyond time and space. My illustrations employ anachronisms and absurdism/surrealism in order to give the scene a timeless quality and make the message stand out more than the content.

Here, I've dressed the two warring factions in uniforms complete with masks in order to "render them unrecognizable."
At the same time, their costumes reveal the secret monstrous identity of their souls.

One half of the souls are costumed as greedy bankers, and another half are costumed as ditzy spendthrift housewives, regardless of their sex (the gender-bending is another level of de-individualization that the inmates of hell go through)

The "weights" that the fighters hurl around are made to look like briefcases and bags of cash on the miserly side and purses and poodles on the squanderer side.

The point that I ultimately try to make is that it is not just the souls of the dead who undergo this dehumanizing transformation into monsters. Anybody who focuses too much on money makes this transformation, at least internally, in this life.

After all, Dante's Virgil says that it's the "tribe of men" (the whole human race) that "contends and brawls" unreasonably for money.

What I intend to show with ALL these illustrations is that the demons, monsters, and tortures of Dante's hell are not just fantasies about external places and beasts, but they are actually depictions or caricatures of the living sinners' inner monstrosity.