The Circle of the Lustful, Paolo and Francesca

Look closely at the darkness behind the human spiral in William Blake’s The Circle of the Lustful, Paolo and Francesca. It consists of hundreds of strokes. They run across the sky, bend around bodies and gather beneath a narrow shelf of ground. Around the brilliant circle at the upper right, they radiate outwards. The same black line that makes Hell oppressive also makes light seem to burst through it. Blake’s engraving gives the storm and its interruption a common material language. ^[1]

The scene belongs to Blake’s Dante illustrations and comes from the fifth canto of Inferno. Paolo and Francesca approach the travelling poet and his guide, Virgil, from among the souls driven by an unending wind. Their story overwhelms Dante, who falls unconscious. Blake brings that fall together with the lovers’ flight and a second, intimate image of the couple inside the radiant sphere. The composition was engraved in 1826–27; individual impressions could be printed much later. Tate’s A00005, for example, is catalogued as reprinted in 1892. Its date describes a different event from Blake’s work on copper. ^[1][2]

A story heard in Hell

Dante enters the second circle under the scrutiny of Minos, who assigns the dead their punishments. Beyond him, a storm buffets the people who subjected reason to desire. The canto compares their collective movement to starlings and to cranes drawn out across the sky. Virgil names figures from ancient history and romance before Dante notices two spirits travelling together. The poem moves from a multitude towards a pair; Blake gives that narrowing of attention a visible shape. His great coil contains numerous bodies, while a separate rising current brings two large figures close to the witnesses. ^[1][2]

Francesca does the speaking. She describes the love that joined them, the violence that brought them to one death and the memory of reading together. Paolo’s contribution is his weeping. Their encounter therefore reaches Dante through two kinds of testimony: an articulated account and a distress that cannot become speech. Blake’s prone poet marks the point at which listening becomes a bodily event. His long horizontal form rests just above other recumbent bodies passing through the lower current. ^[1][2]

In Henry Francis Cary’s translation, Francesca remembers reading the romance of Lancelot. The lovers’ eyes met repeatedly; when they reached the kiss in the book, Paolo kissed her. The text they shared helped carry them into the action it described. Francesca speaks of love as a power acting upon them, but the canto has already established their punishment. The beauty of her account and Dante’s pity do not remove that judgement. His collapse belongs to the experience of Dante the traveller within the poem; it cannot by itself settle the author’s attitude towards everything she says. ^[2]

Cary’s notes identify Francesca as the daughter of Guido da Polenta and Paolo as her husband’s brother; Tate gives the familiar account of their killing by the betrayed husband. Those historical identities stand behind the scene, but Blake concentrates on the encounter after death. He does not reconstruct the murder. The bodies, the speaker’s remembered intimacy and the listener’s helpless response give him enough to organise the image. ^[1][2]

How the engraving directs the eye

The spiral at the left seems solid enough to roll through the picture. Its outer edges enclose figures whose arms, legs and long strands of hair often follow its curves. Within it, individual gestures interrupt the smoothness of the larger form. A face turns out towards us; another head hangs down; a hand extends across the space separating two bodies. The storm becomes legible through the different ways people occupy it. ^[1]

Blake keeps its pale channel distinct from the dark sky with closely spaced lines outside the current and stronger contours along its edge. Inside, more open passages allow the bodies to remain individually readable. The engraved marks establish both a broad route through the image and local points at which to stop. At a distance, the eye follows the coil. Close up, it encounters people caught inside that pattern. ^[1]

The cut edge of the ledge answers the curved current with a rough horizontal barrier. Fine vertical strokes make its exposed side dark and steep, while roots and angular vegetation spread across the top. Dante lies on this thin, precarious surface. Virgil’s robe descends in comparatively long, controlled folds, and his inclined head turns attention downwards. The upright guide, the fallen listener and the souls carried past them occupy three different bodily conditions within the same small stretch of the engraving. ^[1]

Robert N. Essick identifies the Dante plates’ technique as drypoint combined with engraving, without etching. A needle supplied preliminary scratched lines; the graver cut the stronger incisions. That distinction helps explain the image’s range of marks, from tentative, lightly indicated detail to emphatic contour and densely worked shading. It also prevents the entire surface being imagined as the product of one uninterrupted kind of cutting. ^[3]

For an intaglio impression, ink held in the incised lines transfers to paper under pressure. The plate’s surface and the printed image consequently give different appearances to the same design. The original copper survives in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, as 1943.3.1743, dated 1827. In its present photograph, the spiral occupies the right and the radiant circle the left: their positions are reversed in the paper impressions. The copper makes the physical relationship between the engraved surface and its printed result unusually easy to grasp. ^[3][14]

A small inscription at the lower right of the print is itself in mirror-writing. Tate transcribes it as identifying the whirlwind and Inferno V; Essick describes it as drypoint and records its absence from an early proof. The backward letters remain part of the design in its published state. They are useful evidence of the plate’s development, though they do not establish why Blake chose to leave the wording in that form. ^[1][3]

Translating the watercolour into marks

The related Birmingham Lovers’ Whirlwind is a watercolour from 1824–27. The Museum of Modern Art’s 1956 catalogue reproduces that sheet and identifies its Birmingham ownership; Tate explicitly connects it with this engraving. Both place the main spiral on the left, Dante and Virgil on the right, and the radiant lovers above. The print therefore preserves the broad orientation of the drawing even though the copper had to carry its opposite. ^[1][14][15]

The relationship becomes more interesting in the handling of the sky. In the engraving, closely packed strokes turn what could be an uninterrupted dark field into a directional surface. They pull the eye sideways above the coil and then swing towards the radiance. The light has a similarly active structure: long rays cross the surrounding darkness, while a pale interval separates the small central pair from the strongest engraved bands. Illumination is constructed through the distribution of marks and the paper they leave exposed. ^[1]

The couple within the sphere is much more lightly indicated than the large figures below. Their smallness encourages a different pace of looking. They can almost disappear into the bright centre at first glance, then become the point towards which the whole upper part of the composition directs attention. Meanwhile, the lower pair is stretched across the current, reaching towards one another amid sharply defined folds and flowing hair. Blake allows the two appearances to have different degrees of visual weight. ^[1]

The engraving also rewards following lines across apparently different substances. A curving stroke may help describe hair, cloth, cloud or the sweep of the wind. In the crowded foreground these forms come close to merging, yet the darker bodily outlines repeatedly restore their separateness. The image keeps moving between a continuous force and the particular figures subjected to it. Its drama lies partly in that changing balance. ^[1]

What happens inside the light?

Tate’s 1990 catalogue identifies Paolo and Francesca as appearing again, reunited within a glory above Virgil. Its 2004 display caption likewise presents the second couple as truly united. This reading gives the print an extraordinary double movement: the lovers belong to the storm below, while their union can also be imagined within a separate, radiant enclosure. The luminous circle offers an alternative visual condition for their closeness. ^[1]

A later Tate interpretation takes another approach. The 2019 exhibition’s large-print guide describes the small image as a reminiscence of the lovers’ embrace. On that account, Blake gathers a remembered moment of the story into the same picture as its telling and its consequences. The sphere becomes an inset recollection, bringing the kiss into the present encounter in Hell. The two readings ask different questions of the same lightly drawn group: whether we see an ideal reunion or an image of the intimacy Francesca recalls. ^[16]

Dante’s canto supplies no subsequent escape for the couple. It insists that the storm offers no rest, and Francesca speaks from within that continuing punishment. The engraving’s light can support a hopeful response to the lovers, but it does not give an unequivocal sequence in which they leave Hell and arrive in Heaven. The repetition is visible; its precise narrative and theological meaning remains open. ^[1][2][16]

That openness concentrates the force of the engraving. The large group confronts us with bodies caught in motion; the small circle asks us to recognise a relationship within the spectacle. Between them, the fainted Dante records the cost of listening. Blake makes sympathy something the image demands from the eye before it can be reduced to an agreed explanation. ^[1][2]

A copperplate developed through proofs

Blake’s letter postmarked 2 July 1826 places a Dante plate among the things he hoped to take on a visit to Linnell. He planned to carry his book of drawings with one plate enclosed inside it. Cold weather and physical weakness delayed the journey. The letter establishes engraving as part of the continuing project by that summer, although it does not identify the enclosed plate as the lovers’ composition. ^[17]

By February 1827, Blake reported improving the engravings and asked Linnell to return two plates so he could give them sufficient visual strength. His phrase “Shew of Colour & Strength” is striking in this context: tonal force remained a concern even when the means were incised lines. On 25 April he reported having taken proofs of six plates and prepared the fighting devils for copper. These letters describe work still being developed and tested. ^[18][19]

Essick’s study makes that development specific to the Circle of the Lustful. He describes a proof at Princeton lacking many of the later shading and radiating lines, the mirror inscription, the hands of the couple in the sphere and a head near the ledge. The recorded differences show that passages which now appear integrated into one composition reached the plate at different stages. The brilliant upper corner, in particular, acquired some of its definition through further work. ^[3]

Blake died before bringing the Dante engravings to a completed published suite. Tate singles out the fighting devils as conspicuously unfinished and allows that he might have intended more work on the others; Essick regards all seven as unfinished at his death. The lovers’ rich surface should therefore be appreciated without turning its comparative elaboration into a declaration by Blake that he had finished it. ^[1][3]

The printings after Blake

The engraving’s later history complicates the apparently simple question of its date. Essick re-examined the printer’s records quoted in earlier scholarship and distinguished two press runs in September 1838. The first produced twenty-five sets. The second produced ninety-five individual impressions, enough for thirteen more complete sets and four additional sheets. His reading corrects the frequently repeated total of 120 sets, which had treated the second figure as ninety-five sets. These are conclusions from his documentary study, not a census of every impression that survives. ^[3]

The cover label for the 1838 issue connected the pictures with Cary’s translation. For plate I, it selected the final image of Dante falling like a corpse. The choice directs a reader towards the prostrate figure on the ledge as the episode’s identifying action. A print often remembered for its enormous vortex was offered to its first published audience through the listener’s collapse. ^[1]

Another printing followed around 1892, after John Linnell’s death. Tate assigns A00005 to this later issue, explaining that the family’s earlier impressions had been disposed of. Essick shows why distinguishing nineteenth-century sheets can be difficult: the family deliberately sought to reproduce the appearance of the earlier printing, including its paper. Quality alone cannot securely separate every 1838 impression from every later one. His discussion combines paper, inscriptions, provenance and evidence of wear, while repeatedly acknowledging their limits. ^[1][3]

One diagnostic feature occurs on another plate in the suite. Drypoint raises a burr beside the scratched line, which retains ink but wears away through inking and printing. Essick uses substantial differences in the surviving burr on the fighting-devils plate to help order impressions and their companion sheets. He stresses that wear measures use, not the years between print runs. That evidence cannot independently date a lone reproduction of the lovers. ^[3]

Essick also identifies fine impressions printed directly on laid paper, outside the India-paper printings documented in the family’s records. He proposes an early, unrecorded press run, probably before the first recorded issue, but cannot securely date or explain it. The possibility matters because a tidy list of documented editions cannot automatically account for every physical sheet. Nor can a small reproduction supply the paper evidence needed to place an unidentified impression within that history. ^[3]

Lessing J. Rosenwald acquired the plates in 1937 and later commissioned further impressions. Essick discusses a mid-century printing spanning 1953–55, followed by Harry Hoehn’s printing of twenty-five sets in 1968. Tate’s T01950 belongs explicitly to the latter. Its pencil inscription records the restrike and Rosenwald’s ownership, and the catalogue identifies the paper as Japanese. It is an impression from Blake’s original copper, printed long after his death. ^[3][20]

These later sheets also make the printer’s contribution visible. Essick disputes Ruthven Todd’s praise of the 1968 results, arguing that heavy inking obscured distinctions between lines in densely engraved passages. His detailed comparison concerns the fighting-devils plate, so it should not become an automatic verdict on every area of the lovers’ engraving. It nevertheless identifies a useful question to bring to any impression: can the eye distinguish the individual strokes where they gather most closely? ^[3]

The illustration reproduced here establishes the composition, but its exact impression and printing date have not been securely identified. The Tate sheets and the Washington copper offer documented comparisons. Holding those objects apart allows us to look more precisely: at Blake’s invention of the storm, at the marks he developed on metal, and at the different occasions on which that metal returned an image to paper. ^{[1][3][14][20]}