In the Shadow of Dante: A Contemporary Love Story, Seven Centuries Old

The international art market is booming. Agents and gallery owners, frustrated by the lack of acclaimed work available for sale, are frantically searching for accomplished artists to turn into celebrities. Larry Sullivan, an aspiring writer, and Magritt Cline, a doctoral student of art history, are hired by an anonymous patron to prepare a monograph acclaiming the art of Elias Miller, a little known artist who signs his work, Dante the Painter, and has spent ten years illustrating sections of Dante Alighieri’s luminous fourteenth century poem, The Divine Comedy. The couple is surprised and fascinated by the brilliance of Miller’s imaginings of Inferno and Purgatorio, and by his ability to employ the varied painting techniques of Titian and Degas and Picasso. But Larry and Magritt are equally unnerved by the artist’s tendency to adopt the persona of the long dead Dante Alighieri, and to talk about the great medieval poem as if he were its author. Questions quickly arise: Is Elias Miller a charismatic free spirit whose imagination is fired by The Divine Comedy? Is he a charlatan pretending to be Dante in order to achieve celebrity? Is he simply unhinged? Or has Dante, 700 years dead, returned? And what truly drives the anonymous patron who is funding the monograph, a desire to honor the painter or to inflame the value of Dante the Painter’s work for personal gain? As Larry and Magritt’s fondness for Elias and his wife, Beatrice, deepens, another disturbing concern arises: Will they, the hired heralds of Elias Miller’s genius, unintentionally destroy the man himself? While exploring Dante’s revelations of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, Larry and Magritt begin their own romantic journey of discovery.