![]() The first set dates from 1807, commissioned by Joseph Thomas. ![]() And he illustrated Paradise Lost more than any other Milton, in three separate commissions ( peruse them all here). The characters to her left and right are Satan and Death, respectively.īlake loved Milton, and illustrated his work more than any other author. Blake’s portrait relieves Milton’s nastiness, making Sin sympathetic and, well, kinda hot, a Blakean feat for sure. Milton’s description always seemed to me one of the cruelest, most misogynistic renderings of the female body in literature. If ought disturbed their noise, into her womb,Īnd kennel there, yet there still barked and howled,īlake spares us the horror of the latter image-in fact he gets a little vague on the details of the creature’s netherparts, which were always difficult to imagine, and emphasizes the “fair” parts above (in the version below, the serpent/dog thing looks like a costume prop). With wide Cerberian mouths full loud, and rungĪ hideous peal: yet, when they list, would creep, With mortal sting: about her middle roundĪ cry of hell hounds never ceasing barked In Milton, this character “seemed woman to the waist, and fair,” The figure in the center depicts Milton’s grotesquely graphic allegorical construction of Sin. Look, for example, at the play of patterns behind the figures in the illustration above, from an edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. In person, his drawings are indeed impressive, but they are equally so for their careful attention to design and composition as for their heavy, often quite terrifying subjects. But William Blake (1757–1827) is such a tremendous force, his work so monumentally strange and beautiful, that one expects to be overpowered by it. This should not have been surprising-these are book illustrations, after all. When I saw William Blake’s illustrations for the book of Job and for John Milton’s L’Allegro and I l Penseroso at the Morgan Library a few years ago, I was first struck by how small the intricate watercolors are.
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