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‘‘The lantern of the world ! The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00145858211021572

paths’’: Paul Laffoley journals.sagepub.com/home/foi

(1935–2015) and Dante

Arielle Saiber
Bowdoin College, Maine, USA

Abstract
American artist and architect Paul Laffoley (1935–2015) had a life-long fascination with
Dante. Not only did he refer to Dante and the Commedia throughout his writings and
paintings, but he created a large-scale triptych illustrating the poem, as well as sketched
out plans for a full-immersion Dante study center on a planetoid orbiting the Sun, com-
plete with a to-scale replica of the medieval Earth, Mount Purgatory, the material heavens,
and the Empyrean through which a ‘‘Dante Candidate’’ could re-enact the Pilgrim’s jour-
ney. Laffoley’s work is often placed by art critics within the visionary tradition and Laffoley
himself embraced that label, even as he deconstructed the term in his writing. Among the
many visionary artists, poets, and philosophers Laffoley studied, Dante was central. He
was, for Laffoley, a model seeker of knowledge, a seer beyond the illusions of everyday
life. The essay that follows offers a brief biography of Laffoley and his works; an overview
of his two main Dante projects (The Divine Comedy triptych [1972–1975] and The
Dantesphere [1978]); and initial considerations on how Dante’s works and thought fit
into Laffoley’s larger epistemological project.

Keywords
contemporary art, Dante, illustration, Paul Laffoley, visionary art

On November 16, 2015, nearly 700 years after Dante’s death, the planet Earth lost
another extraordinary human being: the visionary artist, Paul Laffoley (Cambridge,
MA, 1935 – Boston, MA, 2015) (see Figure 1). I would like to think Laffoley, like
Dante, is now able to experience the beauties and ineffable paradoxes of the uni-
verse—and beyond—that his works so often imagined, and imaged, in such detail.

Corresponding author:
Arielle Saiber, Professor Romance Languages and Literatures, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine 04011, USA.
Email: asaiber@bowdoin.edu
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Figure 1. Paul Laffoley in his studio in South Boston, January 2015. Photo by Elyse
Benenson.

Dante’s Commedia was one of Laffoley’s most beloved and revisited texts, inspiring
references to Dante throughout his visual art and written work, a massive triptych of
paintings, and a plan for a site in which the Pilgrim’s entire journey would be re-
enacted inside a pentakis dodecahedral planetoid orbiting the sun.
Laffoley’s work bursts with symbols, symmetry, systems, lists, charts, topological
forms ranging from Alexander Horns to fractals, mathematical proportions (e.g.,
phi), the musical octave, pop culture references, and most strikingly, words and more
words. His paintings and writing reference everything from yoga to yugas, UFOs to
utopias, absinthe to aleatory evolution. Laffoley proposes living buildings, time
machines, renewable energy transportation, portals to other dimensions and
times. He sings of the cycles of history and hints at ways to create better worlds
and futures. In including so much knowledge from sources the world over—ancient
and modern—in offering so many new visions of life in this universe, Laffoley created
an encyclopedic, visual cathedral reminiscent of Dante’s poetic one. As Dante wrote
in Paradiso 1, ‘‘Surge ai mortali per diverse foci / la lucerna del mondo’’ [The lantern
of the world rises to mortals by various paths] (1.37–38).
Laffoley often said that he read the Commedia eighteen times: fifteen times in
English and three times in Italian (Laffoley, 1986b: 69). As someone who had the
great fortune of knowing him, I have no doubt this claim was true. Laffoley was a
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brilliant, erudite, encyclopedic, and tireless reader with a photographic memory. His
home/studio was crammed with books from ceiling to floor, wall to wall. Douglas
Walla of Kent Fine Art—Laffoley’s agent since 1987 and the person who boxed up
the artist’s things after he passed away—estimates that Laffoley had over 10,000
books and seventy-two boxes of writing (Walla, 2020). Laffoley was eccentric, yes,
but always consistent in his eccentricities, and ‘‘coherent’’ in his propositions and
practices (Bracewell, 2013: 46), one of these being carefully noting how many times
he (or someone he was studying) did something. Times and time are central to his
work, as can be seen in his numerous writings on the concept of time and the notion
of history, and in his meticulous calculations of actions and events, such as the
amount of time Dante Pilgrim spent in each step of his journey (Laffoley, 1978:
22–23).
Whether meeting with Laffoley in person, attending his public lectures, watching
an interview, or reading his autobiographical writing, one would hear ‘‘the stories.’’1
He never varied his tellings, regardless of his audience. Many of the experiences he
recounted were highly peculiar, full of synchronicities, hard to believe, and even
challenging to comprehend. Did he really experience an alien encounter? What did
he mean by psychotronic? What, and when, is the Bauharoque? What is an eloptic
nohmagraphon? Add to all this the fact that his stories (like his artwork) brim with
multiple languages, extensive philosophical and esoteric terminology and symbol-
ism, and a wonderful sense of humor. No listener or reader or viewer could be faulted
for wondering if he invented some of his experiences. Yet, as Jean-Pierre Larroque
concluded in his 2011 documentary on Laffoley, ‘‘even if you don’t believe what Paul
Laffoley says, it’s important to believe in Paul Laffoley. His work drives our civil-
ization another inch forward’’ (2011). Laffoley did occasionally forget a detail or
two, and he did enjoy playing with language (or rather, languages) and delivering
one-liners to make people laugh, but he never changed the content of his stories. I
should note, however, that among Laffoley’s consistently repeated stories was a
claim to have been born in 1940, five years later than his actual birth date.
Perhaps, like some other artists and public figures, he wanted to seem younger
(and thus even more accomplished) in order to fare better in award and fellowship
competitions. Or perhaps, as I will propose later in this essay, he had a more inter-
esting motive for saying he was born in 1940.
Laffoley’s unusualness begins at his very beginning. He was an only child (or so he
thought), born into a moderately affluent family. His father’s career as a respected
vice president of a bank (Cambridge Trust) sustained the family’s Boston Brahmin
veneer, while more privately Paul G. Laffoley, Sr. maintained a life as a trance
medium, refused to believe in gravity, was friends with the Harvard parapsychology
researcher Leonard T. Troland, and introduced his son to copious paranormal
notions.2 At six months old, Laffoley reported, he uttered the word
‘‘Constantinople’’; he then went silent until age four (Laffoley, 1988b). He was,
later in life, diagnosed with a mild form of Asperger’s, and he said that he learned
after his father died that he had had an elder brother who died of ‘‘extreme autism’’
before Laffoley was born (Laffoley, 1999a: 27). He underwent a second phase of
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silence—an extended state of catatonia that he says he self-induced to experience

being like a zombie (1999a: 27)—in his early twenties, followed by eight electroshock
treatments. In an interview, he told me he thought he might be an ‘‘encephalated
schizophrenic’’ or ‘‘encapsulated psychotic’’3 (Laffoley, 2006, 2008a), and laughed
after he said that. He was likely joking with me. Neither schizophrenia nor psychosis
ever manifested in his life: he never acted erratically, nor was he tormented by voices
or visions; and he never showed anything but kindness and generosity to all who
knew him. What is more, he did not drink or take drugs, even during his harrowing
experience at Woodstock in 1969, where a number of his paintings were exhibited
without his permission and he had to fight to get them back (his telling is worth a
read, and he mentions Dante at its opening4). Yes, in later life, he would make a
number of curious claims: that he had had a few encounters with an alien named
Quazgaa Klaatu (a little suspicious, or intentionally funny, given that ‘‘Klaatu’’ is
the name of the alien in his favorite science fiction film, The Day the Earth Stood Still
[1959]5); that there was an alien laboratory in his brain (see his painting The
Thanaton: The Messenger of the Cosmic Task [1996]6). He also had a lion’s paw
‘‘foot’’ made for fancy events to replace his prosthetic leg (his right leg had been
amputated after a fall that happened the night before his Portaling show opened at
Kent Fine Art in NYC in 20017). But even so, his mind was astonishingly clear, his
talent immense, and the number of people who adored him exceptionally large. As
poet John Yau recently said, ‘‘Paul was a dervish who could maintain long flights of
fancy without ever falling into the abyss of madness. It was a delight and daunting to
listen to him extoll’’ (Yau, 2020). Even Laffoley himself said it was hard to believe
many of the things that he experienced and the information that he received—a
comment that will sound quite familiar to readers of Dante, and to others who
study writers who have encountered phenomena beyond our world and understand-
ing. He noted in his reflections on his 1978 painting The Living Klein Bottle House of
Time that there might, one day, be a device that could help him, and us, make sense
of such curious experiences and mind-boggling data: the ‘‘Agnosticon.’’ It would
allow its user, when faced with unfamiliar or incomprehensible information, ‘‘to
engineer their doubt or faith processes. . . in order to believe or disbelieve any prop-
osition instantly’’ (Laffoley, 2016: 162).8
Laffoley majored in classics and art history at Brown University—taking courses
also in philosophy, and graduating in 1958, not in 1962, as he sometimes stated, and
various publications have echoed.9 He liked to tell the story that he did not actually
finish his senior thesis on Lucretius until 1985, when he submitted it in the form of a
detailed painting visualizing De rerum natura, and for which he received and A- (the
minus for lateness).10 After college, he went to the Harvard School of Design (HSD)
for a degree in architecture. He spoke fondly of working as an assistant to the Italian
sculptor Mirko Basaldella, and of his interactions with his HSD cohort. He was,
however, asked to leave HSD after a year, told that he was being ‘‘grand juried out’’
of the program for his tendency to get ‘‘over involved’’ in his work (Laffoley, 2002b)
and for ‘‘conceptual deviance’’ (Laffoley, 2008a), as when he designed what he called
‘‘living’’ buildings. At the encouragement of his mother, who herself had wished to
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become an architect, he then began architecture school at MIT in the 1964–1965

academic year, was again kicked out, and then in 1967 tried one more time, unsuc-
cessfully, at the Boston Architecture Center. Laffoley did finally receive his archi-
tect’s license in 1990, albeit too late for his mother to celebrate this accomplishment
with him, as she had died in 1984. A number of his drawings and paintings show his
building projects, some of which are based in four-dimensional Klein bottle arrange-
ments (see Figure 2) and Goethe’s notion of Urpflanze, the primordial origin of plant
life (see Laffoley’s painting, Das Urpflanze Haus, 1984) as well as architecture created
through grafted vegetation, ginkgo biloba trees, pine trees, and katsu plants, in
particular (Laffoley, 2000, 2002b).
After being dismissed from HSD, Laffoley spent the early 1960s in New York
City, assisting artists, including his idol, the visionary architect Frederick Kiesler (in

Figure 2. The Living Klein Bottle House of Time (1978).