Vicious circles  Rivers boiling with blood, deserts on fire,
sinners tormented by grinning devils - Botticelli's hell is both
horrible and hilarious, says Adrian Searle  This is hell. A
narrowing funnel leading down to the centre of the earth. Sandro
Botticelli's chart of hell is a little like a mushroom cloud or
a child's spinning top. Look closely, and there are bodies on
the terraces and narrow ledges, writhing like tiny maggots. It
is the first thing you see as you walk into the Royal Academy's
exhibition of his incomplete cycle of unfinished drawings
illustrating Dante's Divine Comedy.  Botticelli's drawings were
made some time between 1480 and 1495, over a century and a half
after Dante Alighieri, a fellow Florentine, wrote the Divine
Comedy. Terraced, pinnacled, travelling forever downward, the
ledges, cities and basements of hell are furnished with sloughs,
gorges and deserts; there are cities, rivers of boiling blood,
lagoons of scalding pitch, burning deserts, thorny forests,
ditches of shit and fro