This etching is from Dante’s Divine Comedy commemorative series.
In the early 1950s, in celebration of the 700th birthday of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, the Italian government commissioned the Surrealist master Salvador Dalí to create 100 illustrations for a commemorative edition of The Divine Comedy. Dalí’s hyperrealistic, bizarre, and nightmarish imagery seemed like the perfect pairing to Dante’s visions of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, yet public outcry against the commissioning of a Spanish artist to accompany the work of an Italian cultural hero forced the Italian government to revoke its support for the project. Undaunted, Dalí worked with a French publisher to have 100 wood engravings (one for each of The Divine Comedy’s verses) made after his own watercolors, which were completed and published in 1963.
The centaur Cacus was a thief who stole Hercules’ cattle and now punishes thieves. This centaur does not “ride the same road as his brothers”: “Non va co’ suoi fratei per un cammino” [Inf. 25.28]). In other words, Cacus does not reside with the other centaurs in the first ring of the seventh circle (Inferno 12), the ring that contains those that are violent against others.
The other centaurs guard the violent sinners who are in the river of boiling blood, but since Cacus was a thief, he is in the seventh bolgia (the division of the eighth circle in which sins of fraud are punished). When sinners such as Vanni Fucci blaspheme against God, Cacus carries snakes and fire-breathing dragons to them. Dante uses centaurs to construct his distinction between violent robbers and fraudulent thieves.
Loc: G.C. pp2699