Emilio Santarelli. Bust of Dante Alighieri

This marble bust of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), the Florentine poet and author of the "Divine Comedy", was carved in 1845 by the Italian sculptor Emilio Santarelli. The sculptor's name and the date, 1845, are cut into the right-hand edge of the bust.

Santarelli (1801–1886) entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence in 1814, later won a stipend to study in Rome and worked with Bertel Thorvaldsen. Among his best-known works is the statue of Michelangelo, completed in 1840 for the series of statues of illustrious Tuscans in the niches of the Uffizi in Florence.