The small sculpture portraying Dante is very close in inspiration to the statuette of Cimabue. Made by Ricci in 1877, the great poet wears a robe and headdress well known through his canonical iconography. Realized with red jasper from Cyprus, the figure of Dante is standing and holding a parchment roll in his left hand.
The statue stands on a base made with oriental alabaster; on its four sides, there are the coats of arms of Florence and of the Alighieri family, and garlands of laurel and oak in the Florentine mosaic or commesso technique.
In 1865, on the occasion of the sixth centenary of the poet’s birth, the Opificio had already made a statuette to be given as a gift to King Vittorio Emanuele II, in the hope of bringing the new ruler’s attention to the ancient manufacture favoured by the Medici and Hapsburg-Lorraine families. Traces of this statuette, which was sent to the 1867 Paris International Exhibition, have been lost.