Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest

Virgil lifts both hands towards the branches while Dante bows his head beside him. Around the two poets, enormous trunks bend and divide, their foliage joining above a small, dark opening. William Blake’s Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest makes the beginning of a journey feel like entering a space that can scarcely accommodate the travellers. The path is uncertain, but the relationship that will carry them along it has begun to take shape. ^[1]

The blue-clad guide is more strongly coloured than his companion. Dante’s robe carries only a pale reddish wash, and his long, lowered profile remains lightly drawn. Their difference in bearing gives the encounter its quiet drama: one man gestures into the wood; the other stands with his attention directed downwards. They are close enough to share an opening between the trees, yet their bodies register different responses to what lies ahead. ^[1]

Tate dates the sheet to 1824–7 and records graphite, ink and watercolour on paper, measuring 371 × 527 mm. It is the second design in Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Its precise literary subject comes at the end of Inferno II, when Dante renews his willingness to follow Virgil and enters the wooded way. The drawing concerns the decision to accept guidance as much as the landscape through which that guidance will lead. ^[1][2]

After the first meeting

The poem’s opening forest has already subjected Dante to a series of reversals. Halfway through his mortal life, he finds himself lost, unable to explain exactly how he strayed. A sunlit height offers hope of escape. As he tries to ascend, three beasts obstruct him: the spotted animal Cary calls a panther, a lion and a she-wolf. The last drives him back towards the darkness, where he encounters the shade of Virgil. These events belong to Inferno I. ^[2]

Recognition brings relief and admiration. Dante knows Virgil as the poet of the Aeneid and acknowledges his importance to his own writing. Yet literary admiration cannot clear the direct path. Virgil explains that Dante must take another route, through the suffering of Hell and the hope of Purgatory. A worthier spirit will eventually conduct him further, because Virgil himself cannot lead him into the divine city. Guidance is offered with an account of its limits. ^[2]

Canto I ends with Virgil moving and Dante following. Canto II then interrupts that apparent readiness. Evening is falling, and Dante questions whether he has the strength or authority to undertake such a journey. Aeneas went to the world of the dead; Paul received a heavenly revelation. Dante sees no equivalent reason why he should be admitted. His thoughts consume the resolve with which he had begun. ^[2]

That hesitation gives Blake’s scene a deeper setting than a first encounter between strangers. Tate’s current label describes Virgil coming to Dante to guide him, a useful summary of their relationship. The museum’s fuller catalogue identifies the selected passage more closely as II, 139–142. Here the guide has already been recognised, the route proposed and the traveller’s renewed doubts answered. Entering the forest requires a second act of willingness. ^[1][2]

What persuades Dante to go

Virgil answers the doubts by explaining why he came. Beatrice descended to ask him to help her endangered friend, trusting the power of his speech. Her intervention belongs to a larger chain of concern: a compassionate woman in heaven turns to Lucia, and Lucia appeals to Beatrice. The visible companion in the wood is therefore the immediate agent of help that has travelled through several voices before reaching Dante. ^[2]

The account changes the nature of the proposed expedition. Dante had feared an undertaking for which he possessed no special permission. Virgil tells him that his safety matters to others and that his rescue has already prompted action. Beatrice’s tears intensify Virgil’s readiness to assist. The guide persuades through a story of concern, bringing an unseen company into the conversation between the two men. ^[2]

Blake includes none of those heavenly women within this composition. Their absence makes the travellers’ small encounter carry the weight of the preceding speech. Virgil’s raised hands can be read in relation to his active role as speaker and guide, while Dante’s lowered head holds the uncertainty that speech has addressed. The gestures remain open enough to suggest an exchange without illustrating every sentence of it. ^[1][2]

Dante describes his recovered courage through flowers that straighten after being bent and closed by night frost. The simile introduces an image of revival immediately before the final consent. Blake surrounds the men with a much larger growth of trunks, branches and leaves. The poem’s delicate flowers need not be hidden symbols in that foliage for the comparison to matter: Dante’s readiness has returned within a setting that still looks formidable. ^[2][1]

One will and two bodies

In lines 139–140, Dante declares that one will now moves both travellers, accepting Virgil as leader, lord and master. The next two lines convert the declaration into action: Virgil moves, and Dante enters the wooded path. The Italian ending binds renewed agreement to physical departure with extraordinary economy. The scene Blake selects stands at that junction between a spoken commitment and its first consequence. ^[14]

Cary renders the declaration as “Lead on: one only will is in us both.” His translation concludes the canto with Dante entering “the deep and woody way.” The renewed journey is possible because two wills have been brought into agreement, while one traveller still depends on the other’s ability to lead. ^[2]

Blake preserves two distinct postures within that shared purpose. Virgil’s bent elbows open the upper part of his body, and his forearms rise towards the canopy. Dante’s arms remain much lower, his shoulders rounded beneath the pale robe. Their feet occupy the same narrow strip of ground. The difference between confidence and dependence becomes a visible relation between neighbouring bodies. ^[1]

The hands are particularly arresting because the path itself is difficult to follow. Virgil does not point along a plainly drawn road that leads out to a distant horizon. Dark, leafy marks fill the gap before the figures, and the great trunks offer little room around them. The guide’s presence supplies direction where the landscape withholds an easy visual route. ^[1]

The image also allows the moment to remain suspended. We can understand that movement is beginning without seeing a long stride or a destination. Dante’s lowered face and Virgil’s lifted hands keep our attention on the relationship that makes the next step possible. The small exchange at the centre gives the surrounding growth a human scale. ^[1][2]

The trees make a threshold

The trees lean towards one another across the picture. At the left, broad, curving trunks rise from exposed roots; at the right, a pale forked trunk spreads its limbs around an oval patch of blue. Branches interlock over the poets’ heads. Their unequal curves create an enclosing structure without the regular geometry of an architectural doorway. ^[1]

Blake varies the density within that structure. Lobed leaf shapes gather above Virgil, where darker wash gives them weight. Elsewhere the foliage is little more than an outline, with paper visible through its scalloped contours. Several pointed, sparsely drawn branches stretch across the blue passages at the right. The wood combines soft masses, abrupt black edges and remarkably empty spaces. ^[1]

Tate’s catalogue identifies the trees as oaks. Martin Butlin suggests that they may represent Druidical error. The proposal gives a possible Blakean significance to their species and enclosing force, while remaining a later scholar’s suggestion. It is not an explanation written by Blake on this drawing, and the image does not provide a complete symbolic key to every branch. ^[1]

The oaks’ visible work is clear even before that interpretation is considered. They make the travellers small, gather them into a restricted opening and obstruct our view of their destination. A viewer experiences the pressure of the forest through its arrangement. Butlin’s proposal can deepen that experience without exhausting what the trees do as drawn forms. ^[1]

This is also a different forest from the later Wood of the Self-Murderers, where transformed souls inhabit the trees. Here the two human bodies remain clearly separate from the vegetation surrounding them. The immediate difficulty is finding and following a way through it. ^[1][2]

Pale colour and evening

The drawing’s colour creates an unusual tension with the poem’s time. Canto II begins as daylight departs and the animals of the earth are released from their labour. Dante prepares to undertake his own arduous journey while the rest of the living world rests. That evening belongs to the literary sequence, even though much of Blake’s sheet looks airy and pale. ^[2]

Blue spreads across the top and into gaps between branches. Thin greenish and grey washes pass over the foliage, and much of the foreground remains close to the colour of the paper. Tate’s October 2023 label calls the blue and green passages sunny regions and identifies carbon black in the threatening wood ahead. The pigment identification is the museum’s statement; the darkness is also plainly visible around the travellers. ^[1]

Those light washes do not establish a literal midday setting. They coexist with an unfinished surface on which many forms have received little colour. Nor must every pale opening be read as a separate source of sunlight. The picture’s tonal organisation makes the patch behind the figures feel deep by placing it beside lightly treated trunks and ground. Material incompletion contributes to the contrast through which we experience the wood. ^[1][2]

Looking from edge to centre, we encounter a gradual increase in visual resistance. Open paper and blue wash give way to overlapping contours, then to the concentrated greys behind the men. The approach becomes harder to see through as it nears the place where guidance matters most. The scene can communicate uncertainty without turning the whole sheet uniformly dark. ^[1]

An unfinished drawing within an unfinished series

Fine drawn lines remain visible beneath and beside the darker strokes. Some establish the contours of trunks; others lightly propose foliage or extend branches across areas that have barely been washed. Virgil’s robe has enough blue and shadow to separate its folds, while Dante’s body depends much more on delicate drawing. Blake’s different degrees of development remain exposed across the same surface. ^[1]

That exposure rewards slow looking. A bold line can suddenly sharpen one edge of a tree whose other side dissolves into pale wash. A cluster of leaves is densely worked beside another that remains an empty shape. The eye moves between suggestions and emphatic marks, following decisions that have reached different stages of definition. ^[1]

John Linnell commissioned the Dante illustrations in 1824. When Blake died in 1827, he left 102 watercolours in varying stages of completion, as well as seven unfinished engravings. This sheet’s open surface belongs to that broader unfinished undertaking. Its position as the second design describes its place in the poem’s sequence; it does not establish that Blake painted it second or worked through all the sheets in narrative order. ^[15][1]

The incompletion also limits reconstruction. We can describe the contrasts that survive, but cannot confidently supply the colours Blake would have added, decide how dark every trunk would have become or recover a final balance he never brought to completion. The existing drawing has its own clarity: two men gather beneath trees whose partly developed forms make the way ahead both visible and uncertain. ^[1]

Names, marks and the sheet’s later journey

The catalogue records that the drawing was exhibited in 1913–14 under the Italian words “Tu duca, tu signore, e tu maestro”. This earlier title draws attention to the acceptance of Virgil’s authority at line 140. The present title emphasises the passage into the wood; the earlier one places the relationship between the travellers first. ^[1][14]

A pencilled inscription at the lower right refers to Hell, canto 2, line 140. Tate’s catalogue questions whether it is in Blake’s hand. The line reference is exceptionally apt to the scene’s consent, yet the uncertainty about its writer matters. The catalogue also records a canto 22 inscription on the reverse, alongside other numbers and notes. That reverse reference does not relocate the visible subject to a later episode. ^[1][14]

The support bears the watermark “WE”. Tate supplies no numerical manufacture date with that transcription, so the letters should be kept distinct from the collection’s dating of the artwork. These modest marks remind us that the forest is also a worked sheet of paper, capable of being numbered, annotated, turned over and ordered among other drawings. ^[1]

The series remained with Linnell and his heirs until its sale at Christie’s on 15 March 1918. Tate’s catalogue records the whole Dante group within one lot, bought by Martin for the donors. This drawing entered Tate in 1919 through the National Art-Collections Fund, with assistance from the National Gallery, Lord Duveen and others. Its present museum setting follows a long period in which the sheets remained together. ^[1][15]

Within that large history, the drawing preserves a small encounter beneath enormous trees. At the end of the canto, agreement becomes movement. Blake leaves that first movement surrounded by a forest whose full extent neither the travellers nor the viewer can yet see. ^[1][2][14]