There's a small show at Christ Church fixed to coincide with the Oxford Literary Festival. Curator of the Picture Gallery Jacqueline Thalmann sought among the 2,000 drawings in Christ Church's collection for those works, Biblical aside, with closest relation to literary texts. The resulting exhibition, Italian poems interpreted - drawings after Dante and Tasso (until May 14), consists of ten drawings from the 16th century, including Jacopo Ligozzi's scenes from Dante's Divine Comedy and two depictions of the poet himself. There are also five Old Master drawings by Guercino, Naldini and others around the theme of Torquato Tasso's 16th-century heroic poem on the First Crusade, Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered).

The rich imagery of Dante Alighieri's epic allegorical Comedy narrating the poet's imaginary journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven has always inspired artists, as well as composers and poets the world over. Italian masters such as Botticelli have illustrated editions, and it was a source of inspiration for English artists from John Flaxman and Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Blake, whose visionary series of illustrations remained unfinished on his death. Jacopo Ligozzi (1547-1626), the son of a Veronese family of artists who went to Florence to work for the Medici and became one of the city's most prolific artists and head of the Grand Duke's artistic workshop, made some of the most famous 16th-century illustrations. His skill and precision in drawing plants and animals can be seen in his drawings here of scenes from the Inferno (Hell).

The first of the three in pen and brown wash on brown-tinted paper shows Dante watching the sunrise in the dark forest (Inferno, I. 16-18). It's a troubled man we see, Dante lost in a dense wood, the first shafts of sunlight streaming in to help him find his way, in Ligozzi's interpretation of the poem's opening lines: "Midway along the journey of our life/I woke to find myself in the dark wood." The second shows Dante beset by wild beasts, a lion with "head held high and furious for hunger," a "nimble-footed" leopard and rangy she-wolf, and meeting the poet Virgil who will be his guide. Then, an intensely detailed image follows of the poets on the banks of the Acheron. Romance, big-time - knights, daggers, maidens, bare-breasted, struggling, swooning or submissive, men carrying off the spoils of the sacked temple - is the subject matter for the five works variously illustrating, thematically or pictorially, Tasso's poem.

I enjoyed this exhibition. It's bite-sized and will nicely do the job of enticing you into the gallery to fill those spells between talks. But whether you'll be able to extricate yourself once surrounded by all that other wonderful early Italian art in Christ Church's tranquil little gallery is another matter.