Discussing the Divine Comedy with Dante is a painting by Dai Dudu, Li Tiezi, and Zhang An depicting 103 cultural icons. It was released without credits on the internet in 2006 as a kind of painterly mystification and became an internet phenomenon in early 2009.

The painting’s antecedents are Disputation of the Holy Sacrament (1508/1509) and The School of Athens (1509/1510) or The Parnassus all by Raphael. Here[1] is a list with all the visual sources.

At first I thought it was uninteresting kitsch and had way too many political figures to be of interest of me. But then I thought this work might make it into the list of  works of art in the collective unconscious. Besides, due too its large presence of Chinese celebrities, it can easily be regarded as an example of 21st century Chinocentrism. And I like to believe that China is the only World Power to challenge Pax Americana as we’ve known it for the last sixty years.

List of celebrities include mostly figures from the political realm, sourced here[2].

1. Socrates 2. Cui Jian 3. Vladimir Lenin 4. Prince Charles 5. Ramses or King Solomon or Sinuhe of Egypt 6. Bill Clinton 7. Peter the Great 8. Charles de Gaulle 9. Margaret Thatcher 10. Ulysses S. Grant 18. Bill Clinton 11. Bruce Lee 12. Winston Churchill 13. Raphael Sanzio or Matisse 14. Robert Oppenheimer 15. Elvis Presley 16. William Shakespeare 17. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 18. Genghis Kahn 19. Napoleon Bonaparte 20. Che Guevara 21. Fidel Castro 22. Marlon Brando 23. Lao zi or Hokusai 24. Marilyn Monroe 25. Yassar Arafat 26. Julius Caesar 27. Mike Tyson 28. George W. Bush 29. Luciano Pavarotti 30. Salvador Dali 31. Empress CiXi 32. Liu Xiang 33. Kofi Annan 34. Prince Charles 35. Ariel Sharon 36. Ho Chi Minh or Qi Baishi 37. Osama Bin Laden 38. Qin Shi Huang 39. Mikhail Gorbachev 40. Mother Teresa 41. Song Qingling 42. Otto Von Bismarck 43. Saint Peter or Rabindranath Tagore 44. Li ZhenSheng 45. Voltaire 46. Hu Jintao 47. Dante Alighieri or Julius Caesar 48. Pu-Yi or Dai Dudu 49. Saloth Sar 50. Yi Sun-Sin or Yue Fei 51. Michelangelo 52. Hideki Tojo or Hiro Hito 53. Michael Jordan 54. Dwight Eisenhower or John Calvin Coolidge 55. Corneliu Baba 56. Claude Monet 57. Mahatma Ghandi 58. Vincent Van Gogh 59. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec 60. Marcel Duchamp 61. Confucius 62. Noah 63. Li Bai or Caravaggio 64. Mao Zhedong 65. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 66. Zhou Enlai 67. Marie Curie 68. Abraham Lincoln 69. Pablo Picasso 70. Steven Spielberg 71. Friedrich Nietzsche 72. Karl Marx 73. Leonardo Da Vinci 74. Joseph Stalin 75. Queen Elizabeth II 76. Lu Xun 77. José de San Martín 78. Deng Xiaoping 79. Sun Yat-Sen 80. Theodore Roosevelt or George Custer or Maxim Gorky or Philippe Pétain 81. Saddam Hussein 82. Benito Mussolini 83. Adolf Hitler 84. Guan Yu 85. Pelé 86. Bill Gates 87. Audrey Hepburn 88. Ludwig Van Beethoven or Chopin 89. Charlie Chaplin 90. Henry Ford 91. Lei Feng 92. Victor Babeş or Norman Bethune 93. Mike Tyson 94. Sigmund Freud 95. Erich Honecker 96. Vladimir Putin 97. Lewis Caroll 98. Shirley Temple 99. Chang Kai Chek 100. Leo Tolstoy 101. Albert Einstein 102. Ernest Hemingway 103. Franklin Roosevelt 104. Woman from photograph by Cartier Bresson or Mother Teresa 105. Dolly (the cloned sheep)