Cerberus

Three heads rise from one enormous chest. One snaps towards the left, another opens its jaws upwards, and the third turns a broad, toothy face towards us. Beneath them, great clawed hands close over small human bodies. William Blake’s Cerberus brings the guardian of Dante’s third circle of Hell so close that the creature almost fills the sheet. The travellers who must pass him remain faintly drawn at the right, beside a mouth capable of swallowing a head. ^[1]

The watercolour belongs to Tate, which dates it 1824–7 and records graphite, ink and watercolour on paper. Its horizontal sheet measures 372 × 528 mm. Blake made another close view of the same monster, now in Melbourne, as well as a broader view of the circle. Their differences help explain the action suspended here: Virgil is preparing to quiet the monster with handfuls of earth. ^[1]

A cold circle of ravenous mouths

The episode follows Dante’s encounter with Paolo and Francesca. Overcome by their story, he falls unconscious at the end of Inferno V, the moment Blake pictures in The Lovers’ Whirlwind. The sixth canto begins as his senses return. Everywhere he looks, he finds another torment. The weather has changed from the wind that carries the lovers to a ceaseless fall of heavy, cold rain, hail and dirty water. The ground stinks beneath it. ^[2]

This is the circle of the gluttons. Its punishment makes bodily indulgence repellent: the sufferers lie exposed in filth, turning from side to side in an effort to shelter themselves from the storm. Cerberus adds his noise and violence. Dante gives him three throats, red eyes, a greasy black beard, a large belly and hands armed with claws. He tears and flays the spirits. The text passes from the monster’s barking to the souls’ howling, making torment a shared, deafening sound. ^[2]

Blake takes that mixture of animal and human characteristics seriously. His guardian has a long body and curling tail, but the forelimbs have the swelling muscles, bent elbows and gripping fingers of arms. The heads combine heavy muzzles with expressions that can seem disconcertingly human. This creature can bite with three mouths and seize with two enormous hands. Looking for an ordinary dog beneath the distortion misses the way Dante’s description already combines different kinds of anatomy. ^[1][2]

When the beast sees the travellers, all his limbs shake and he bares his teeth. Virgil bends to the ground, spreads his hands, fills them with earth and throws it into the hungry mouths. Dante compares the effect to feeding a barking dog: the animal’s fury subsides as its attention turns to swallowing. The offering is dirt. The guide needs to occupy the appetite long enough to continue the journey. ^[2]

That choice gives the action its particular harshness. Cerberus receives something to consume, but the earth offers none of the pleasure associated with a meal. His hunger can be manipulated through the act of ingestion itself. The monster’s relation to the gluttons becomes especially uncomfortable when his enormous mouth and their fragile bodies occupy the same foreground. Appetite is both the organising force of this region and one of the means by which it inflicts pain. ^[1][2]

The respite belongs to the travellers. After the feeding, they walk across the prostrate shades, whose apparent substance gives way to emptiness beneath their feet. The rain and the punishment continue. Reading beyond the monster’s first appearance makes clear how narrow Virgil’s success is: he secures a passage through an enduring condition. ^[2]

Three heads, one overwhelming body

Blake spreads the heads across the middle of the image, allowing each a different direction. The left head projects sideways, with a blunt nose, rounded eye and irregular teeth. Its open lower jaw extends over the dark back. The central head lifts higher and stretches its mouth into an enormous opening. At the right, the third head turns outward, showing a broad grin beneath wide eyes. Each expression gives us another point of attention. ^[1]

The eyes are especially insistent. Their rounded outlines stand out against the loose greys of the heads, with reddish touches around some of the sockets and muzzles. Dante’s crimson eyes provide a textual starting point, while Blake makes the gaze multiple. We are confronted frontally even as the other mouths turn elsewhere. A creature with several heads can seem capable of attending to every approach at once. ^[1][2]

Dark tufts beneath the jaws recall Dante’s black beard. The necks converge into broad, pale forequarters, where long contour lines describe swelling muscle. The heads seem restless; the heavy chest holds its ground. Behind it, the darker body extends towards the left, ending in a tail that curls upward against the arch’s opening. The horizontal reach of the back balances the upward thrust of the necks. ^[1]

At the bottom, a huge hand covers a sufferer’s body, while the other grips near a separate head at the right. Fingers and claws have enough definition to make the contact legible. The victims’ smaller heads, bent limbs and pale outlines become entangled with the monster’s anatomy and the ground. Blake gives us the evidence of violence through grasping and confinement, without needing to illustrate every mutilation described in the canto. ^[1][2]

Scale does much of the work. The creature’s chest occupies the space in which several human bodies might otherwise stand. His hands make the sufferers look small and vulnerable, and his heads compete with the opening behind them. The people have scarcely any free ground around their bodies. Our view is similarly crowded: the monster lies across almost the whole width available to the eye. ^[1]

Finding Virgil at the edge

The travellers require a slower look. Both stand at the right, where the graphite drawing is much lighter than the strong black contours of the beast. Virgil inclines towards the heads; Dante remains farther back. Their light drawing makes the approach seem tentative beside the creature’s strongly established presence. The sheet brings developed colour and barely elaborated figures into the same encounter. ^[1]

Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue locates this sheet at the moment just before Virgil feeds the first head. The gesture is easy to lose in a small reproduction because the guide’s arms and hands remain faint. His practical action gives those pale lines their importance. The two poets have come close enough for the earth to reach the monster, and the guide must act while his companion waits beside him. ^[1][2]

This is a striking answer to the creature’s size. Virgil does not need a body to match it. His response begins with the ground beneath his feet and the use of his hands. Cerberus’s limbs grasp the helpless; the guide’s hands gather something that will make movement possible. The poem supplies that difference in action, and Blake allows it to remain a small, consequential event at the picture’s edge. ^[1][2]

Why Melbourne’s Cerberus looks different

The National Gallery of Victoria calls its related sheet Cerberus (second version). Accession 991-3, it is dated 1824–1827 and catalogued as pen and ink and watercolour over black chalk and traces of pencil. Its dimensions, 37.3 × 52.7 cm, are close to those of Tate’s sheet. It is a separate drawing with a different arrangement of the feeding and the bodies below. Tate’s sheet bears its canto inscription at the lower left; Melbourne’s places it at the lower right. Even that small difference helps distinguish the two closely related compositions. ^[1][13]

In Melbourne’s image, Virgil bends forward with both arms extended towards the raised central mouth. The contact between hands and muzzle makes the feeding much more immediate. Dante stands behind in a long reddish robe, with an upraised hand. The heads are gathered into a tighter group, and the left one turns more towards the spectator. Blue, pointed forms mark the inner edge of the opening. The crouched body, sufferers and strong curve overhead retain the common setting while changing its emphasis. ^[13]

Tate’s catalogue reports Albert S. Roe’s suggestion that Melbourne’s version was made earlier and abandoned because its monster was insufficiently formidable. Butlin offers another explanation for the difference: Melbourne appears to represent a slightly later moment in the story, when the earth is already pacifying Cerberus. Its changed expression could therefore belong to the action being illustrated. Roe’s proposed order of making and Butlin’s proposed order of events answer different questions. ^[1]

The distinction is useful whenever the works are called first and second versions. Those labels allow us to distinguish the sheets, but the narrative sequence does not by itself document which one Blake drew first. Nor does a quieter monster establish an unsuccessful attempt. Seen together, the watercolours let us follow the changing balance between barking, intervention and the brief absorption of feeding. ^[1][2][13]

The pressure of the cave

A broad dark arch bears down across Tate’s scene. Its lower edge curves around the three heads, enclosing a field of red, pink and yellow. Long black strokes hang from the upper region, and blue-grey washes thicken the surrounding darkness. The monster’s low body fits inside the opening, so that the mass of the rock and the mass of the creature seem to press towards the same narrow foreground. ^[1]

Dante gives this circle its foul weather and exposed sufferers, but he does not specify the cave in which Blake places Cerberus. Butlin suggests that the enclosure probably evokes the weight of the material world. That is an interpretation offered by the catalogue. The visible pressure provides a reason to consider it: the arch occupies an immense proportion of the sheet, while human bodies lie beneath an animal whose own weight is already oppressive. ^[1][2]

The cave also controls the encounter in a directly practical way. The travellers approach along its side, where the lightly drawn figures nearly disappear against the rock. A large opening remains visible behind the monster, but his body blocks our view across its lower part. The space feels passable only through some change in the guardian’s attention. Virgil’s feeding answers a problem the composition makes us feel before we know the text. ^[1][2]

The warm interior brings another tension. Dante’s circle is cold and wet; Blake sets his creature against colours associated with the flames of Hell. Tate’s 2004 display caption identifies vermilion, yellow gamboge and a pinkish-brown lake pigment thought to be brazilwood in those distant flames. The familiar fiery background belongs to Blake’s visual treatment, while the canto supplies the specific weather endured by the gluttons. Keeping both in view preserves the difference between the poem and this illustration. ^[1][2]

Tate’s technical account also identifies charcoal alongside pencil, followed by pen and ink. It notes the care with which Blake kept drawing materials and colours from overlapping, because charcoal can absorb colour from red lakes. This material detail helps explain the picture’s combination of forceful dark drawing and separate passages of glowing colour. The black roof and the warmer opening establish distinct zones, while thinner washes leave the chest and foreground bodies comparatively pale. ^[1]

Beyond the monster’s close view

Blake also pictured the setting at a distance in The Circle of the Gluttons, with Cerberus, now in the Fogg Museum at Harvard. Tate distinguishes it as Butlin 812.11, beside the close views numbered 812.12 and 812.13. In the broader drawing, reproduced by Hayley Flynn, the cave and its tiny guardian appear across a landscape of rock, water and recumbent bodies. The difference is immediately visible: we encounter a whole region before facing the monster at close range. ^[1][14]

Flynn uses these related views to explain how Blake makes the journey coherent through landscape. The distant Cerberus supplies a destination, while the following close encounters bring the poets alongside him. This is another narrative relationship among the designs. It allows changes of scale and viewpoint to carry part of the story, alongside the actions of the figures themselves. The wider project is explored in Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. ^[14]

The complete sixth canto then moves beyond Cerberus to an individual sufferer. Ciacco raises himself from among the prostrate souls and asks whether Dante recognises him. They speak about Florence, its divisions and the fate of people Dante remembers. Ciacco eventually asks to be mentioned when the traveller returns to the living world. His request gives personal memory a place within a punishment that first appears as an anonymous mass of bodies. ^[2]

After Ciacco falls back, Dante asks Virgil whether the final resurrection will make the suffering more or less severe. The guide explains that a more complete being will feel both pleasure and pain more fully. The canto ends as the travellers reach Plutus, preparing the next descent. Cerberus occupies a forceful episode within this longer movement through encounter, conversation and continued travel. ^[2]

Tate acquired its watercolour in 1919 through the Art Fund, with a special National Gallery grant and donations including Lord Duveen’s. An earlier exhibition identification remains uncertain: Butlin notes that the work shown at the Royal Academy in 1893 as Cerberus—the Circle of the Gluttons could have been either close view or the broader Fogg drawing. The title leaves the exhibited sheet unidentified. ^[1]

Here, the particular sheet makes its own immediate demand. Finding the guide’s faint approach changes how we read the first overwhelming impression. Even this body, occupying almost everything in sight, has an appetite that can turn its attention aside. For Dante and Virgil, that moment is enough to pass. ^[1][2]