Ok, here we go. First, we arrange the entire text within an approximately square-sized table (70 x 72 cells, in this e.g.):
Next, let’s associate an RGB color to each ASCII character, building a GIF palette of 256 colors.
Therefore we will use only a few dozen colors out of the 256 palette: most will remain unreferred, as they are associated with characters that do not recur in the text (footer "DivineComedy.Art" included). Unused colors are leaved to gray tones, spreading from black to white:
This way, each poem's char will be identified by its corresponding color index. Then, let's highlight them filling the background of the chars' cells:
At this point the "magic" begins.
As if it were a huge puzzle of 5022 char pieces, we go on swapping them - 49 intermediate transitions, in this e.g. - until we compose an intelligible image, taken from several famous masterpieces (such as those of Gustave Doré), that refers to the poem from which we started:
We leave the text characters superimposed on the colored cells, but slightly softening the contrast (shades of gray) to improve the visibility of the background image thus recomposed. Here is the final result:
The scrambled text, made up of exactly the same 5022 characters (but obviously illegible!) can be checked here. An animated GIF summarizes the “Divine” Metamorphosis:
Each artwork is digitally signed – 65-byte-long Ethereum ECDSA signature – by its creator Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), whose address is (please note how it starts: 0xDA126521...):
This address is also the owner/controller of the ENS domains divinecomedy.art and divinecomedy.eth. His signature is embedded directly into the color palette of each GIF itself. Ok, but how?
The first 64 bytes of the signature (r + s, 32 + 32) are segmented in the two least significant bits respectively of the Red channel values for the works concerning the cantos of Hell, of the Green channel values for those of Purgatory and of the Blue channel values for those of Paradise.
The last byte of the signature (v, recovery identifier), on the other hand, can be obtained from the color index 0x79 of the palette, respectively by the value of the Green channel for the GIFs concerning the cantos of Hell, by the Blue channel for those of Purgatory and by the Red channel for those of Paradise.
The signature of each GIF artwork, which guarantees its uniqueness and authenticity by divinecomedy.art, can therefore be easily verified in this way:
That’s it, anime prave.
ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare».