Solvent Transfer and the Reimagining of Hell: Religious Narrative in Rauschenberg’s Inferno Series

Abstract

In an era of accelerating secularization, art serves as a vital mediator for non-institutional forms of spirituality. This article examines Robert Rauschenberg’s Inferno series (1958–1960) as a case study of how modern art reconfigures religious narratives to engage with humanity’s “ultimate concerns.” Through his solvent transfer technique, Rauschenberg dismantles Dante’s theological structure and reconfigures it into a fragmented, participatory experience of spirituality. The argument develops in two parts. First, it demonstrates how Rauschenberg secularizes sacred imagery to portray modern social realities as a “contemporary inferno” marked by systemic violence and commodified desire. Second, it theorizes that the materiality of solvent transfer—its blurring, erasure, and contingent traces—creates what may be called “material spirituality,” a sacred presence perceived through absence and indexical trace. Within this reconfigured structure, spectatorship itself takes on a ritualistic character. When confronted with fragmented and unstable imagery, viewers engage in active, contemplative practice, transforming the act of viewing into a secular ritual of attentiveness. Thus, Rauschenberg’s Inferno radically redefines the religious function of art—not as redemption, but as the cultivation of fragile yet enduring forms of spirituality within the estrangement of modern life.

1. Introduction

The Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia (Divine Comedy, c. 1307–1321), written during his exile beginning around 1308, is widely recognized as one of the greatest achievements in world literature. This monumental poem creates a profound and enduring symbolic universe rooted in Christian theology. Through its three-part structure—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—it presents a theological worldview intertwined with late medieval eschatology and moral order (Barnes 2011, pp. 1–15).

The concept of Hell is a central tenet of Christian theology, inspiring countless portrayals as the antithesis of God’s realm. Representations of Hell are associated with depictions of vices—specifically the seven deadly sins (anger, avarice, envy, gluttony, lust, pride, and sloth)—and with the devil, or Simia Dei (Cheney 2016, pp. 488–519). Most importantly, Hell is the place where damned souls are believed to reside after death. However, Christian canonical scripture offers no detailed description of Hell’s location, shape, sensory attributes, or its malevolent inhabitants. In Inferno, Dante depicts Hell as the ultimate domain of excruciating pain and eternal punishment (Alighieri and Singleton 1990, pp. 5–10). Upon entering the Inferno, Dante passes through an archway inscribed with the words: “Abandon all hope, you who enter here”. Lucy Beckett observes, “What is shocking, of course, about Dante’s hell is its finality…nothing here will ever change. Here there is no love for the loveless…no mercy for the eternally condemned” (Barnes 2011, pp. 1–15).

From Erwin Panofsky’s iconological perspective, Dante’s Inferno is a visual treasury rich in symbolic meaning. Through dramatic encounters, biblical typology, allegory, and complex metaphors, Dante renders theological concepts such as “sin,” “punishment,” and “despair and alienation” both concrete and visible (Fisher 2024, p. 2). These images form a coherent symbolic system that conveys doctrine and mirrors the journey of the individual soul. Interwoven with historical, mythological, and biblical figures, this system anchors abstract theological teachings in a concrete critique of Florentine society, revealing the cultural foundations of its iconography (Guénon 1925, pp. 24–28). More importantly, the narrative structure of the Inferno creates a ritualized imaginative space. Guided by Virgil (representing reason) and Beatrice (representing divine grace), Dante embarks on a spiritual journey from Hell, through Purgatory, to Paradise (Kleinhenz 1986, pp. 225–36). As Victor Turner and Hans Belting argue, this structure constitutes a “ritual space” (Karamipour and Salehi Ardakani 2015, pp. 79–98), following the logic of a religious rite of passage—from condemnation and purification to ultimate bliss. This structure provides readers with a contemplative experience that transcends physical space, enabling a symbolic transformation of the soul through the text.

Since its inception, The Divine Inferno has inspired countless visual interpretations. Sandro Botticelli’s 92 drawings for The Divine Comedy have been especially praised for their beauty and sensitivity, offering a faithful visual rendering of the poem (Watts 1995, pp. 163–201). Doré Gustave’s (Jelbert 2021, pp. 154–87) wood engravings—renowned for their dramatic force—became some of the most widely circulated visual renditions of the poem. William Blake’s watercolor illustrations infused the text with anti-clerical emotional intensity (Burnside 2018, pp. 1–12). These artistic responses continuously reshape the perception and semantic space of Dante’s text, attesting to the openness and vitality of its visual language.

This tradition of translating Dante’s text into visual form set the stage for 20th-century reinterpretations. The 700th anniversary of his birth in 1965 became a pivotal moment, drawing responses from academia, the media, and cultural institutions in the United States. From university courses and New York Times features to the emergence of numerous non-academic Dante clubs, Dante emerged as a cultural icon within the realm of popular discourse (Mare 1965, p. 29). Against the backdrop of Cold War anxieties, spiritual crises, and growing secularization, his reflections on human suffering and despair gained renewed relevance (Mirzoeff 1999, p. 17). Robert Rauschenberg grew up in a fundamentalist Church of Christ family, and religious themes and imagery frequently appeared in his works from the late 1940s to the early 1950s (Duffy 1997, pp. 92–101). It was within this historical context that Robert Rauschenberg created his Inferno series (1958–1960), comprising thirty-four works corresponding to each canto of Dante’s Inferno. Unlike his earlier and often controversial Combines (Folland 2010, pp. 348–65), this project was met with critical acclaim. In 1963, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York acquired the series, which was later published as a deluxe edition by Harry N. Abrams and toured internationally. The Inferno project marked a major turning point in Rauschenberg’s career, signifying a shift from formal experimentation toward deeper explorations of history and spirituality.

Scholars have interpreted Rauschenberg’s Inferno series from various perspectives. Auricchio (1997) analyzes its queer coding and strategies of covert expression through the lens of metaphor and identity. Krauss focuses on its experimentation with media, particularly the innovations in image-making through solvent transfer techniques (Krauss 1999, pp. 86–116). Hiroko and Robert emphasize its allegorical reconstruction of contemporary American society (Hiroko and Rauschenberg 2010, pp. 205–8). Richards highlights Rauschenberg’s sustained interest in themes of religion and spirituality in his early works (Richards 2011, pp. 39–49). Smith explores its visual dialogue with historical artists such as Botticelli (Smith 2016c, pp. 77–103). Krčma examines Rauschenberg’s formal analysis and media experimentation in the Inferno series (Krčma 2017, pp. 964–75). These studies have undoubtedly provided valuable insights into the Inferno series—its formal innovations, socio-political connections, identity politics, and art historical context. While this scholarship offers diverse perspectives, it has rarely addressed the Inferno series from a religious or spiritual standpoint, nor examined in depth how Rauschenberg reconstructs and extends Dante’s religious visual narrative in a highly secularized context.

Drawing on detailed image analyses and historical contextualizations of previous research, this article examines how Rauschenberg conveys the spiritual dimension of Dante’s text through visual language, material experimentation, and modes of spectatorship—thus addressing a key gap in the literature on religion, spirituality, and modern art.

2. Definition of Concept

2.1. Spirituality

In this article, spirituality is understood not merely as a general search for meaning, but as an orientation toward transcendence, a disposition that turns away from the physical or secular toward sources of meaning that exceed these domains. Unlike religion, which denotes a system of communal beliefs and practices generally grounded in faith in a deity (Astrow et al. 2001, pp. 283–87; Hall et al. 2004, pp. 386–401), spirituality here refers to a decentralized and individualized experience of transcendence in a secular age (Taylor 2007, pp. 25–28). It is not simply the confrontation with “ultimate concerns” such as sin, death, alienation, or existential Isolation, but rather the way artistic engagement with these concerns may open toward a transcendent dimension—whether conceived in philosophical, aesthetic, religious, or psychological terms (a disposition toward God, toward beauty, or toward the infinite possibilities of the self). This study takes Dante’s Inferno and Rauschenberg’s reinterpretation as a paradigmatic case to illustrate how spiritual meaning is mediated across historical and material boundaries.

2.2. Solvent Transfer

Solvent transfer refers specifically to the image-transfer technique pioneered by Rauschenberg in 1952 (Krčma 2017, pp. 964–75), which is distinct from the use of solvents in conservation or restoration. The process involved cutting images from magazines such as Life or Sports Illustrated, soaking them in turpentine or lighter fluid, and rubbing the back of the page to reverse-transfer the image onto new paper. The solvent dissolved the ink, detaching the image from its original context while softening its contours, introducing blur, and fragmenting details. Rauschenberg often layered these transferred forms with pencil, chalk, crayon, gouache, or watercolor, creating visually ambiguous, reversed impressions. In the Inferno series, this method served as a creative strategy to challenge the editorial authority of mass media and to reframe images within a secular yet spiritually charged visual language.

3. Reconfiguring the Sacred: From Theological Allegory to Modern Spirituality

This chapter employs iconographic analysis to examine how Rauschenberg’s Inferno series engages with the textual imagery of Dante’s Inferno and its later visual traditions. By comparing themes, symbols, and narrative structures, it demonstrates how Rauschenberg reconstructs the visual narrative of “hell” within modern media and contexts.

3.1. The Secularization of the Sacred Image

In the Inferno series, Rauschenberg does more than simply reinterpret Dante’s allegorical-theological imagery. Instead, he translates it into a visual vernacular grounded in the material and psychological realities of Cold War-era America. This visual language is composed of media imagery, consumerist culture fragments, and bodily politics. It no longer adheres to the medieval cosmological-theological order, but instead reflects a modern social structure shaped by systems of violence, control, and desire (Wainwright 1993, pp. 89–94). In Inferno Canto 3, the narrative focuses on the warning inscribed on Hell’s gate, the punishment of the uncommitted, and the opening scene leading to the River Acheron. Its central themes include the abandonment of hope, acceptance of God’s just judgment, and the inevitability of souls entering Hell. In Rauschenberg’s Inferno Canto 3 (Figure 1), the ferryman Charon is replaced by a stark, oppressive industrial cargo ship (Sullivan 1950, pp. 11–17), while the dome of the U.S. Capitol—a potent symbol of state power—appears in the same frame. This juxtaposition transforms “Hell” from a site of divine punishment into a historical illusion shaped by the machinery of the modern state. Similarly, in the original Inferno Canto 12, Dante and Virgil reach the entrance to the first ring of the seventh circle of Hell—the realm of the violent—where they encounter centaur guards, symbolizing primal, savage, and uncontrollable violence. The scene unfolds in a steep infernal gorge, charged with a rushing, furious atmosphere and dominated by the menacing presence of these fearsome sentinels. In Rauschenberg’s Inferno Canto 12 (Figure 2), the centaur—a monstrous figure in Dante’s original text symbolizing savage violence—is substituted by a Formula One race car in Rauschenberg’s rendition. This vehicle embodies mechanized aggression, sensory thrill, and the cult of speed. In this context, violence is no longer an expression of personal savagery but has become a demonstration of technological systems. The infernal canyon of classical mythology is reimagined as a televised visual spectacle, shifting the locus of horror from the mythical to the media-saturated contemporary world.

Canto 31 of Dante’s Inferno depicts Dante and Virgil’s journey into the deepest region of Hell—the Valley of the Giants—where colossal figures stand as sentinels, half-submerged in a vast chasm. These giants symbolize pride and rebellion against divine authority. The canto features three principal giants: Nimrod, Ephialtes, and Antaeus. The canto’s atmosphere is solemn and foreboding, underscoring the harshness of Hell’s depths and the formidable presence of these mythic guardians. In Rauschenberg’s Inferno Canto 31 (Figure 3), the giants—Nimrod, Ephialtes, and Antaeus—no longer howl across the frozen plain. Instead, they appear as bodybuilders and weightlifters—cropped, recombined, and recontextualized. Their musculature bears the traces of mechanical reproduction—cut, collaged, and assembled into bodies under systemic control. One of the giants’ hands even takes the form of a computer cursor, indicating not submission to divine will, but compliance with technological command. The figure of Adam—the falsifier—also undergoes a secular transformation. Instead of Dante’s grotesque, swollen, and parched depiction, he appears as a sumo wrestler—monumental, performative, and non-Western. More significantly, his body is layered with credit cards, photocopiers, and corporate logos. The moral economy of sin gives way to the debt structures and simulated identities of capitalism. Throughout the series, the female body reappears as flattened, magazine-style photographs. These images allude to both the punishment of adulterers in Dante’s Inferno and the gendered disciplining of desire in contemporary visual culture. The cargo ship, Formula One race car, and bodybuilder deconstruct traditional sacred symbols while simultaneously reconstructing “ultimate concerns” oriented toward modern existential predicaments—such as systemic violence, technological fetishism, and the commodification of the body—as shown in

Table 1. Contemporary Iconography in Rauschenberg’s Dante’s Inferno Drawings: Spiritual/Religious Translations and Critical Directions.

Dante’s Original Element	Contemporary Image Used by Rauschenberg	Spiritual/Religious Translation	Modern Spiritual/Social Critique
Charon (Ferryman, Myth)	Modern cargo ship → Portrait of George Washington (Canto 3)	Symbol of death/transition; burden of power and history	Critique of national myth; metaphor for historical repetition
Centaur (Guardian, Myth)	Formula One race car (Canto 12)	Force of violence, speed, and loss of control	Technological alienation; dehumanized violence
Giants (Power, Myth)	Olympic weightlifter (Canto 31)	Primitive strength; oppressive authority	Critique of power worship; commodification of the body

. Rauschenberg’s Inferno series should be understood not as a deconstruction but as a reenactment—not a repudiation of the sacred, but a mourning of its collapse. He compels viewers to confront an unsettling truth, after the sacred disintegrates, what emerges is not liberation but a new inferno—woven from images, systems, and debt—equally cruel, and perhaps more insidious.

3.2. Contemporary Expressions of Individual Spiritual Quest

In the Inferno, Dante’s journey is primarily about recognizing and confronting the nature and consequences of sin. Rauschenberg, rather than diverging from this vision, recontextualizes it through the visual lexicon of Cold War America, incorporating mass media imagery, consumerist symbols, and representations of political violence. In doing so, he articulates a modern condition of spiritual dislocation and existential loss, exposing the alienation produced by secular modernity. In Canto 4 (Figure 4), Rauschenberg juxtaposes the Arch of Constantine—a symbol of Christianity’s legalization—with a male figure from a golf club advertisement (True Temper ads). The result is a striking revelation: the gateway to faith has been occupied by consumerism. As Morgan David observes, the material supports of religious art—icons, ritual objects, sacred images—are here reduced to mere ink particles on the pages of Sports Illustrated (Morgan 2005, pp. 220–25). Through this solvent transfer, Rauschenberg reinforces T. J. Clark’s argument: “The sharpest critiques of modernism are often sugar-coated in the language of commercial imagery.” In Inferno Canto 17, it depicts usurers punished beneath a rain of fire on burning sand. Through a perilous descent on the back of Geryon, Dante and Virgil are carried into the Eighth Circle of Hell. In Rauschenberg’s Inferno Canto 17 (Figure 5), an advertising golfer figure is used to represent Dante. This represents a “symbolic emptying” of the protagonist, replacing the unique soul-pilgrim with a standardized body shaped by advertising. The individual’s spiritual quest is thus reconfigured as the dissolution and disorientation of subjectivity in consumer society, providing a sharp critique of modern spiritual rootlessness. As Tomkins recalls, the advertising golfer figure was selected because at that scale, it was the most neutral popular image I could find (Tomkins 1980, p. 158). When the standardized bodily grids used in advertisements serve as Dante’s visual substitute, the unique spiritual pilgrimage of the medieval soul is reduced to a passive, disoriented condition within modern technological systems. The self becomes a mass-produced identity, lacking a spiritual anchor. The advertising golfer figure’s standardized posture before a gridded wall epitomizes the disciplining of the body under industrial logic. So-called neutrality, in this case, functions as the forced erasure of difference. As the golfer figure recurs throughout the series (notably in Canto 17 and Canto 33), Rauschenberg highlights the absurdity of spiritual aspiration in a society dominated by commercial signs. Under the regime of advertising, human depth is flattened into two-dimensional surfaces of consumer imagery (Wainwright 1993, pp. 89–94). Meanwhile, Virgil appears in Canto 17 not as a solemn guide, but as a playful youth climbing a statue during Olympic festivities. The marble stadium of the 1960 Rome Olympics, once a symbol of classical ideals, becomes a site of frivolity—suggesting that Enlightenment rationality has degenerated into a parody of public spectacle. Inferno Canto 23 depicts Dante and Virgil’s journey through the Fifth Circle of Hell, during which they narrowly escape pursuit by demons. Virgil’s act of lifting Dante resembles a father cradling his child, conveying Dante’s dependence on Virgil’s guidance and protection, and symbolizing vulnerability and reliance in the spiritual journey. The original excerpt is provided below (Alighieri and Ciardi 1954, p. 188):

“my Guide and Master bore me on his breast,

as if l were not a companion, but a son.”

In Rauschenberg’s Inferno Canto 23 (Figure 6), the image of Virgil lifting Dante resembles not a companion’s gesture but that of a father cradling a child. Rauschenberg draws on an advertisement featuring a father and son to underscore the pilgrim’s helplessness. The warm familial image is recontextualized as a burdensome scene in hell, indicating that modern technological society has deprived individuals of a space for spiritual maturation.

Dante’s Inferno Canto 33 primarily focuses on the crimes and punishments of traitors. Ugolino recounts his harrowing imprisonment and starvation in the lowest, coldest circle of Hell. He offers a detailed account of his betrayal and confinement in the so-called “Tower of Hunger,” where he watched his sons gradually perish from starvation, powerless to save them. The canto vividly conveys his profound despair and grief, along with the tragic helplessness of familial love in such dire circumstances. In Rauschenberg’s Inferno Canto 33 (Figure 7), the image of a starving child lying supine on a cross shatters the illusion of well-being promised by consumer capitalism. When the healthy body promised by capitalist affluence is refigured as a Christ-like symbol of hunger and sacrifice, the advertising golfer reveals the hollowness behind the mask of neutrality. Through these haunting images, Rauschenberg lays bare the spiritual cost of modernity: the dissolution of selfhood, the commodification of the sacred, and the emergence of a new inferno hidden within the spectacle of abundance.

3.3. Diagnosing the Social as a “Contemporary Inferno”

In several illustrations, Rauschenberg replaces Dante’s historical and mythological figures with contemporary individuals, thereby constructing a “modern inferno” (Smith 2016b, pp. 145–68). The images he selected were far from arbitrary; instead, they were carefully chosen “exemplary images” drawn from the visual archive of twentieth-century American mass media and public culture. These images themselves are widely recognized symbols, rooted in cultural myths—such as the nation’s founding ideals, consumerism, and technological worship—as well as collective memory. Through Rauschenberg’s appropriation and recombination, they form a symbolic system diagnosing the conditions of modern society (Antonella 2011, pp. 323–37). This reconstruction of “hell” is essentially a profound spiritual diagnosis of society as a site of pathology, exposing core aspects of the modern existential crisis. Rauschenberg astutely incorporated emblematic 1960s media events—such as the Olympics and presidential elections—and their key figures into the visual narrative of the Inferno series. In his later paintings, the allusions to contemporary events became more explicit. Rauschenberg suggests that Dante and Virgil encounter escalating violence and chaos as they descend into the lower circles of Hell (Dickerman 2017, pp. 24–25). In Canto 12, The Violent Against Neighbors, Dante and Virgil visit the seventh circle of Hell, where they encounter “great war-makers, cruel tyrants, and highwaymen—those who shed the blood of their fellow men” (Smith 2016a, pp. 258–67). Rauschenberg reimagines this scene through Cold War figures, depicting Dante as John F. Kennedy and Virgil as Democratic elder statesman Adlai Stevenson, and placing them alongside Nixon, who is portrayed as both a perpetrator and a victim (Smith 2016b, pp. 145–68). In this depiction, Nixon appears as a “docile body” trapped in a cycle of violence. His distorted presence in the river of blood underscores the vulnerability of political authority and the material embodiment of punishment (Matthews 1966, p. 68), while also highlighting the arbitrariness and ideological fluidity of the labels “good” and “evil” during the Cold War.

In Inferno Canto 3, as the pilgrim and guide approach the gates of hell, Rauschenberg uses an image of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs to depict this ominous structure. In Canto 9 (Figure 8), Virgil and the pilgrim attempt to enter the infernal city of Dis, moving through an environment cloaked in the shadows of heretics. Rauschenberg uses a magazine photograph showing the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., where the dome is stripped of paint for restoration, revealing a reddish sheen reminiscent of the Soviet Union. The monument is tilted and distorted, symbolizing the perceived communist threat to American democracy. A Japanese communist protester is depicted as one of the three Furies (Erinyes), while the city of Dis is formed by an inverted U.S. Capitol building. The Statue of Liberty is removed, and the entire structure is coated with red anti-rust paint, evoking a Cold War atmosphere of menace. This can also be interpreted as a satire on the extreme anti-communist paranoia of the 1950s. In Canto 21 (Figure 9), Rauschenberg depicts Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba as Malacoda, the demon captain. In the following canto, this role is assumed by a figure resembling Fidel Castro. This fluidity of identity underscores Rauschenberg’s critique of the arbitrary moralization of “evil” and the ideological fluidity of Cold War politics. Finally, in the lowest circle of hell, Rauschenberg selects a fashion model from an Esquire advertisement—dressed in Russian-style clothing with a skull motif embedded in her torso—to represent a soul possessed by demons. This fusion of the fashionable body and the sinner’s skeleton serves as a biting satire on the visual politics of late capitalism: damnation no longer stems from theological transgression, but from the convergence of media aesthetics and political will (Seckler 1966, pp. 73–84).

Rauschenberg’s “modern inferno” is not a random collage of images but a coherent diagnostic framework centered on three types of alienation. First, corporeal alienation: the fragmented bodies of bodybuilders in Canto 31 and the standardized grid of the advertising golfer in Canto 17 (Figure 5) reveal how consumer society disciplines the body. This reflects the ways modern visual culture enforces normative forms and behaviors, turning individual bodies into standardized, reproducible images within commercial and media systems. Second, through solvent transfer, images of figures such as Lumumba and Castro are detached from their original historical contexts and suspended as signifiers adrift in an indeterminate semantic space. This referential dislocation parallels the fate of sinners in both Dante’s Inferno and Rauschenberg’s reimagined hell, where they are trapped in perpetual systemic cycles with no possibility to transcendence. Third, Dante’s theological structure of guidance—led by Virgil (reason) and Beatrice (grace)—is replaced by the nihilistic revelry of Olympic youth (Canto 17) and the mechanical determinism symbolized by directional arrows. When these arrows close into a loop (as in Canto 18, where souls chase their own footprints), the youth is absorbed in repetitive athletic performance. Rauschenberg reconstructs Dante’s hell as a powerful site of “spiritual diagnosis” by juxtaposing Cold War political imagery, consumer culture symbols, and alienated bodies. He reveals that the social system itself—its logic of violence, symbolic control, bodily discipline, and existential emptiness—already constitutes a cruel and hidden “contemporary hell.” This powerfully exemplifies art’s potential as a critical medium within a secular context to examine the collective spiritual condition and “ultimate concerns.”

4. Media as a Spiritual Interface: Solvent Transfer and the Metaphysics of Materiality

4.1. Solvent Transfer and the Materiality of Secular Transcendence

Rauschenberg was a bold innovator in the field of visual media. In his Inferno series, he adopted solvent transfer to move away from traditional techniques such as painting or drawing, exploiting the medium’s tendency to blur, fragment, and reverse imagery in order to sever its ties to mass-media contexts. The resulting images are not full reproductions but unstable residues—traces that suggest what is absent. This absence is not void but a “presence-in-withdrawal,” oscillating between visibility and disappearance, staging what might be called a material manifestation of spiritual elusiveness.

Such ambiguity and contingency form the material basis of a secular spirituality: an attentiveness generated not by metaphysical salvation but through rupture, dislocation, and suspension in visual and historical conventions. Here, Derrida’s notion of the “trace” does not secure presence but points toward it through delay and deferral, evoking a fragile sense of the sacred (Montag 2011, pp. 26–44). “Transcendence” in this context refers less to metaphysical salvation than to a rupture in visual and historical conventions. Solvent transfer breaks images open—blurring, reversing, and disrupting them—detaching them from their editorial frameworks. This distortion compels viewers into interpretive uncertainty, echoing the disorientation of Dante’s infernal journey. What is transcended, then, is not the world itself but the authority of traditional image-making, the coherence of realism, and even the unity of the pictorial surface. Rauschenberg’s medium destabilizes the image’s integrity, inviting a liminal space where trauma, memory, and doubt coexist—a material spirituality grounded in the fragmented conditions of modern existence.

Critics have frequently likened this effect to the low-resolution, flickering surfaces of mid-twentieth-century American television screens (Gilbert 2017). As Joseph and Rauschenberg insightfully observed, this media effect reveals a new visual logic shaped by television and print culture—where images are no longer eternal and clear but unstable, blurred, and fragmented: a new visual ontology (Joseph and Rauschenberg 2003, p. 177). In this sense, Rauschenberg’s medium is no longer a passive vessel for imagery but a dynamic interface—a permeable surface through which the image penetrates, dissolves, fragments, and recomposes itself.

The fragility of these images—with their blurred edges and ghostly contours—is not simply an aesthetic choice, but deeply echoes the themes of shadow and suffering in Inferno. Since 1954, Rauschenberg had incorporated fragmented materials and imagery in his Combine Paintings, arranging them according to an open-ended associative logic. In contrast, the Inferno series provided a more ordered compositional framework through Dante’s tightly structured poetry, which, in Rauschenberg’s words, allowed him “to test whether I could work in a more constrained and structured way” (Keach 2023, pp. 140–74). This structure led him to develop a visual language that interweaves fragmentation and figurative narration, generating a tension between chaos and form, as shown in

Table 2. Technical–Visual–Spiritual Correspondence of Solvent Transfer in the Inferno Series.

Solvent Transfer Technical Feature	Visual Effect	Type of Spiritual Experience (Secular Transcendence)
Reversal (mirror transfer)	Image flipped left–right, spatial orientation disrupted	Breaks visual habits, induces perceptual instability and cognitive disorientation
Blurring	Softened contours, loss of detail	Creates uncertainty, forcing the viewer to actively participate in meaning-making
Erasure (partial removal)	Portions of the image disappear or are incomplete	Suggests ruptures in history and memory, prompting reflection on loss and forgetting
Layering with other media	Images from different times and contexts coexist	Generates a sense of temporal dislocation, mirroring the spiritual–historical interweaving in The Inferno
Muted tones	Soft, desaturated colors	Conveys a sense of decay and the fragility of existence
Visible material traces (paper texture, stains)	Visible paper fibers, stains, scratches	Reinforces the materiality of the work, reminding viewers of the medium’s fragility and the erosion of time

.

Rauschenberg often divided the picture plane into two or three horizontal bands, sometimes marked by hand-drawn lines extending across the composition. He also inserted rectangular frames into the composition, generating additional “spatial zones” where visual fragments from different temporal layers—past, present, and mythic—interweave. This compositional strategy is especially evident in the illustrations for Cantos 2 to 4 (The Descent, Vestibule of Hell, and Virtuous Pagans). In these works, the images frequently blur distinctions between foreground and background, literal and symbolic, universal and particular, turning the picture surface into a theatrical stage where Dante’s poetic narrative engages with the cultural anxieties of Cold War-era America.

For instance, in Dante’s Inferno Canto 18, the narrative describes the first and second bolgias of Malebolge in the eighth circle of Hell, where mainly “fraudsters” and “pimps” are punished. Here, Sinners are scourged by demons, stripped naked, and immersed in filth, reflecting the moral corruption and degradation of their crimes.In Rauschenberg’s Inferno Canto 18 (Figure 10), Dante and Virgil appear in the image’s upper-left corner as small, marginal figures. This arrangement highlights the punished bodies as the central visual focus. The punishment of panderers and flatterers—endless marching and immersion in excrement—is visualized through a choreography diagram, annotated with penciled arrows. These arrows resemble schematic diagrams from industrial manuals, suggesting that punishment in hell has been systematized, depersonalized, and even choreographed. The lower portion of the image includes close-up visuals of human waste, which blur and obscure the faces of the damned. The dark palette and hazy visuals suggest that the paper’s surface itself contributes to the degradation of these bodies.

The “spirituality” conveyed through the materiality of Rauschenberg’s medium is not the conventional form rooted in transcendental faith or doctrine. Instead, it denotes a modern, secular experience of uncertainty, fragmentation, and emotional intensity, emerging from the viewer’s encounter with degraded images, ambiguous signs, and disrupted visual coherence. The solvent transfer serves not as a conduit for divine revelation, but as a means of evoking existential reflection, temporal dislocation, and the search for meaning amid visual and historical instability. For instance, in Rauschenberg’s Inferno Canto 31, Nimrod’s figure is created through a selective transfer of a weightlifter’s photograph. Only the torso’s center remains intact, while the rest dissolves into blurred, liquefied stains, making Nimrod resemble a failed photographic negative emerging from solvent traces. His “partial visibility” not only signifies the punishment for hubris but also symbolizes the limits of human perception when facing the monstrous. Precisely for this reason, the ambiguity of solvent transfer became Rauschenberg’s most powerful tool for conveying The Inferno’s core themes: invisible fear, unknowable realms, and unspeakable suffering. For viewers at the Castelli Gallery, these layered images—worn by mechanical reproduction and distorted by technical processes (Krauss 1981, pp. 47–66)—were not simply seen but experienced as a modern ritual of descent. This immersive experience, echoing Dante’s narrative arc, turned aesthetic contemplation into a mediated spiritual journey—a living response to Virgil’s iconic warning: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

4.2. Fragmented Narration and Continuous Temporality

When creating illustrations for his Inferno series, Rauschenberg adopted a “one canto at a time” approach: he began working immediately after reading the English translation of each canto, without reading ahead. This method aimed to elicit an immediate response to each canto’s context, enabling him to re-experience Dante’s evolving narrative across centuries (Antonella 2011, pp. 323–37).

Rauschenberg treated time as a compositional element, juxtaposition Dante’s sacred narrative with contemporary Cold War imagery. The imagery in each canto corresponds to contemporary events at the time of its creation, producing a visual expression of simultaneity. The size of each image was carefully calibrated to reflect the narrative weight of the corresponding text. As Rauschenberg explained to Krauss: “The space given to each image corresponds to the space occupied by the author’s words” (Krauss 1999, pp. 86–116). For instance, in Inferno Canto 31, when Dante and Virgil encounter giants—massive figures described in detail and mistaken for mountain-like forms—Rauschenberg selected an image of Olympic wrestlers that spans the width of the page. This image covers more than half the page, making it one of the largest transferred images in the series. This precise alignment with the text suggests that the Inferno illustrations are not merely visual “representations,” but rather a synchronous construction of textual structure, temporal density, and visual rhythm. To emphasize the text–image juxtaposition, Rauschenberg added brief narrative summaries—typed by Michael Sonnabend—to each work.

Rauschenberg often overlaid solvent transfer images with arrows and technical drawing lines to create a visual guidance system. This system functions both as a path indicator and as a theological response to industrialized visuality. For example, some images depict scenes of gilded arms being transported behind car windows, reflecting a contradictory fusion of the religious and the mechanical. Although certain elements clearly reference Dante’s narrative, the precise correspondence between image and text is often ambiguous and unstable (Feinstein 1990, p. 346). Dore Ashton once attempted to “read” these images linearly from top left to bottom right but soon realized that such a linear sequence is likely absent (Dore 1963, p. 37). This is a key characteristic of the solvent transfer medium: the inherent chaotic ambiguity of the images transforms viewing into a state of deep meditation. In this mode of viewing, the audience gazes with focused intensity, much like confronting an icon—facing a juxtaposition of the full moon and industrial crane wreckage, entering a profound state where perception and cognition intertwine.

Dante’s Inferno itself possesses a loosely integrated structure—each canto can be appreciated as a relatively independent fragment, yet woven into a unified design by divine arrangement (Alighieri et al. 1982, pp. 21–23). Rauschenberg extends this tension visually, acting like an “image-based montage practitioner” who reconstructs Dante’s underworld journey through the visual syntax of fragmentation of his Combine Paintings. Within a single image, multiple temporal-spatial scenes, iconic symbols, and allegorical actions are juxtaposed—for example, in Canto 31, the giant’s torso, Antaeus’s hand, chains, and horns appear side by side—expressing a nonlinear spiritual narrative.

Just as Dante often introduces the next canto with a refrain, Rauschenberg sometimes links two images through shifting visual motifs. Cantos 31 and 32 exemplify this—giant feet and legs reappear at the top of the Canto 32 illustration. In Rauschenberg’s Inferno Canto 7 illustration, Dante and Virgil are shown only as legs and lower body contours at the top edge of the image, implying passage through a heterotopic space. In Dante’s Inferno Canto 34, Dante and his guide leave the deepest part of Hell—the Circle of Judas—where they behold Lucifer himself. The devil’s vast wings beat relentlessly, producing icy gales that freeze the waters of Lake Cocytus—a potent symbol of absolute cold and despair. Thereafter, Dante and his guide climb up and down Lucifer’s body, emerge from Hell, and enter a natural cavern, preparing to return to the light of the living world. This moment combines elements of terror, desolation, and deliverance, marking the end of the journey through hell. In Rauschenberg’s Inferno Canto 34 (Figure 11), movement unfolds along a continuous vertical path from top to bottom, echoing Dante’s description of the inverted descent through Lucifer’s body. The heterogeneity and scale differences within these images resonate with Dante’s portrayal of hell’s fragmented nature, as well as his own confusion and moral disorientation when confronting hell. Rauschenberg once expressed to Clement Greenberg his desire to “recreate Dante’s sensory overload in understanding human sin and suffering.” The visual spectacles crafted by Cold War media provided a contemporary context for this goal—within these “media inferno,” morality and truth themselves became obscured and ambiguous.

4.3. The Spirituality of Material

The solvent transfer technique employed by Rauschenberg exemplifies “material spirituality,” a concept that highlights the capacity of material forms and artistic processes to generate spiritual experience within secular contexts. Instead of seeking to restore a lost sacred aura, his practice reactivates materiality—through blurring, erasure, and fragmentation—as a site where spirituality emerges in contingent, elusive traces. Rauschenberg made extensive use of images from contemporary magazines such as Life and Sports Illustrated (Siedell 1999, p. 75; Cullinan 2008, pp. 460–70). In Walter Benjamin’s terms, these mass-produced industrial images—highly reproducible and widely accessible—had long lost their traditional “aura” (W. Benjamin 2018, pp. 226–43). Unlike religious images shaped by ritualized viewing and the passage of time, magazine photographs intrinsically lack uniqueness or sacred value. Rather than attempting to restore this lost aura, Rauschenberg’s solvent transfers re-materialize the images through the very process of manual rubbing, which introduces contingency—blurring, erasure, and fragmentation. This procedure produces singular, unrepeatable traces that simultaneously embody artistic control and its loss.

It is precisely within this tension that Rauschenberg reopens the possibility of spiritual presence. Yet this presence is not the direct revelation of the divine, but what might be called a negative presence—a spectral remainder perceptible only through absence. The solvent transfer’s blurred edges and fragmentary marks do not disclose transcendence positively but intimate it through withdrawal, what Derrida describes as a “trace”. In this sense, the transfer mediates “between visibility and spiritual presence” not by manifesting sacred content but by embodying the paradox of a presence marked by disappearance. Branden Joseph insightfully compares these traces to stigmata: like wounds that mark divine intervention through corporeal rupture, Rauschenberg’s solvent traces mark the convergence of history, material process, and artistic intent (Joseph and Rauschenberg 2003, p. 177). They function neither as purely symbolic images nor as mere material residues, but as indexical inscriptions where spirituality arises through its very elusiveness.

Embedded within Dante’s textual framework, these transferred images transform fragments of consumer culture into symbols of spiritual elusiveness. For example, in Canto 31, a photograph of Olympic wrestlers is transfigured into a blurred giant, echoing Dante’s figure of bondage yet refusing stable representation. Here, meaning is not given but demanded: confronted with fragmented, unstable imagery, viewers must pause, reflect, and assemble significance from partial signs (Palmer 2007, pp. 1–8). This act of projection transforms looking itself into a contemplative practice. Unlike Dante’s Inferno, which directs the pilgrim toward purification and redemption, Rauschenberg’s Inferno opens onto a spiritual space defined by instability, alienation (Matthews 1966, p. 68), and the impossibility of transcendence.

In this way, the Inferno illustrations become tools for secular visual contemplation. Their blurred and fissured surfaces disrupt the functional logic of mass media and reawaken perceptual attentiveness. This contingent, trace-based quality does not rest on originality or sacred authority, but emerges through the viewer’s active, interpretive labor. Rather than guiding toward redemption, Rauschenberg’s transfer images stage a modern ritual of descent without God, in which viewers confront despair, absence, and fragmentation, and through this confrontation cultivate a fragile yet persistent form of spiritual attentiveness. Whereas Dante’s Inferno ultimately serves the pilgrim’s purification within a teleological framework of salvation, Rauschenberg’s Inferno offers no such eschatological horizon. Instead, it transforms the descent into a secular ritual of perception, where viewers are confronted with fragmentation, absence, and instability. The “spirituality” at stake here is not transcendence beyond the secular, but a fragile attentiveness to meaning within the very conditions of modern alienation.

4.4. A Ritual Without God: The Rituality of Viewing in Rauschenberg’s Work

Rauschenberg’s Inferno series uses an unconventional interpretive mode to deconstruct the sacredness and authority of traditional religious imagery, while at the same time constructing a spiritual ritual rooted in modernity. In the post-religious era, spiritual experience shifts away from the church and toward acts of viewing, the fluidity of images, and inner processes of perception (Belting 2005, pp. 302–19). Accordingly, the series can be seen as a form of “secular pilgrimage.” It transforms the exhibition into a ritual space, elevates viewing into a performative act, and turns fragmented images into vehicles of modern spiritual meditation (Morgan 1998, p. 50). This ritual of viewing, grounded in material traces and perceptual participation, differs sharply from Andy Warhol’s commodified repetition of religious motifs, which suggest the consumption of faith, and from Bill Viola’s immersive video installations, which pursue the contemporary sublime. Rauschenberg’s path is one of “descent”: it embraces ambiguity, fragmentation, and the noise of everyday life—excrement, advertisements, and images of catastrophe. Within the rough corporeality of carnivalesque aesthetics (Lachmann 1988, pp. 115–52) and the material “failures” of the medium (blurring, dissolution), spirituality arises through direct confrontation with the conditions of existence and through a profound mode of perceptual engagement.

This ritual is concretely activated in the exhibition process, producing a unique “viewing ritual”. In contrast to many medieval church contexts, where meaning was mediated through liturgy or clerical authority, viewers of Rauschenberg’s works enter an open, fluid, and ambiguous interpretive space (Mitchell 2005, pp. 336–41). His images are no longer fixed symbolic systems but fragmented elements cut, transferred, and reassembled. This fragmentation destabilizes the boundaries of sacred narrative and forces viewers to rely on their own perception for interpretation. Thus, viewing no longer centers on receiving meaning but shifts toward actively generating it. Viewers move through the gallery, pause, contemplate, and develop personal rhythms of experience, becoming poets of their own pilgrimage (Bourriaud 2002, p. 125). Ultimately, this ritual is less about attaining redemption than about sustaining an open cycle of resistance, reflection, and provisional meaning.

More significantly, the locus of spirituality shifts from external ritual and institutional authority to inward personal experience. In traditional religious imagery, sacredness typically derives from divine manifestation, saintly guidance, or doctrinal authority. By contrast, in Rauschenberg’s visual world, spirituality emerges as a state of “contemplative engagement” between viewer and image—a contemplative, ineffable relation grounded in interiority. This inward turn resonates with modern existentialism and phenomenology that affirm the value of individual perception (Eliade 1959, p. 81). Rauschenberg’s Inferno illustrations are thus not merely responses to religious visual traditions; they also attempt to construct a contemporary ritual form. The traditional moral journey is reimagined as a spiritual passage enacted through acts of seeing, interpreting, and perceiving. In this journey, each viewer becomes a traveler, a thinker, and the author of their own Inferno. This ritualistic quality depends heavily on specific visual conditions created by the medium—fragmentation, blurring, and trace-based ambiguity. It is precisely the visual uncertainty and openness of meaning produced by the medium (solvent transfer) that compel viewers to abandon passive reception and enter an active, contemplative mode of seeing. This mode itself constitutes the core practice of the secular spiritual ritual that Rauschenberg designed. He holds a unique position in the postwar lineage of religious art: he neither returns to traditional notions of the sublime (as Viola does) nor indulges in postmodern irony (as some of Warhol’s works do) (B.-C. Benjamin 2000, pp. 1–36). Instead, through a material critique of the medium and a ritualized reconstruction of the viewing process, he forges a path that confronts the burdens of existence through art and activates individualized spiritual resonance in an era of divine withdrawal. The outcome of this “ritual without God” is not purification in the Dantean sense but a secular practice of endurance—an act of facing fragmentation, ambiguity, and the absurd, through which viewers may discover either an individual resonance or a fleeting sense of shared human condition. Therefore, by deconstructing traditional image sacredness and narrative authority, Rauschenberg reconstructs the function of artistic space as a “secular sanctuary” and the act of viewing as a practice of a “Ritual Without God,” offering a non-institutionalized spiritual pathway for individuals seeking meaning in a secularized world.

5. Conclusions

This study has examined Rauschenberg’s Inferno series as a reconfiguration of Dante’s vision within the conditions of Cold War modernity. Through solvent transfers, Rauschenberg transformed fragments of mass media into unstable, contingent traces that mediate between material process and spiritual presence. These blurred and fragmented marks do not restore the sacred aura of religious imagery but reopen a space of attentiveness where viewers confront existential estrangement. In this sense, the Inferno illustrations enact what might be called a “ritual without God”—a secular practice of perception in which spirituality persists not as transcendence, but as fragile meaning-making grounded in material trace.

By recasting Dante’s narrative of eternal punishment into a fragmented, secularized visual form, Rauschenberg redefines the role of art in the post-religious age: not to promise redemption, but to sustain the possibility of spiritual engagement. The Inferno series thus stands as a key case study at the intersection of art and spirituality, significant for showing how media materiality can generate new forms of secular ritual and spiritual attentiveness. This contribution deepens debates on the persistence and transformation of religiosity in secularization theory and provides critical resources for rethinking the relation between religion, art, and spirituality in contemporary culture.