Dante Running from the Three Beasts

Dante throws both arms into the air as three animals confront him from a wooded slope. His red robe sweeps towards the left while his face turns back towards the beasts. Behind him, a pale figure in blue extends his hands. Across the water, a sun rises from behind a low hill. William Blake’s Dante Running from the Three Beasts brings fear, hoped-for escape and the arrival of help into one brilliantly coloured landscape. ^[1]

The animals occupy almost the whole right half of the picture. The spotted creature crouches nearest the lower edge; the lion stands above it; the she-wolf stretches across the higher ground beneath the trees. Their heads face towards Dante, forming three successive interruptions to his progress. The landscape offers light and distance, yet the immediate way is full of bodies that prevent him from passing. ^[1]

The National Gallery of Victoria dates the watercolour to 1824–27 and records pen and ink and watercolour over pencil and black chalk. Image and sheet measure 37.3 × 52.8 cm. The work belongs to the Melbourne collection as accession 988-3, Felton Bequest, 1920, and is catalogued as Butlin 812.1. It opens Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, with a subject drawn from the first canto of the Inferno. ^[1]

A climb that turns into retreat

Dante begins the poem lost in a dark forest, midway through his life. He cannot clearly explain how he entered it: sleep or spiritual dullness has accompanied his departure from the true path. The narrator remembers its terror even while preparing to tell of the good he found there. The opening therefore contains a promise that the frightened traveller cannot yet understand. ^[13]

At the foot of a hill he looks up and sees its shoulders illuminated by the sun. Fear loosens its hold. After resting, he begins to climb, placing his weight on the lower foot. This bodily detail gives the ascent a hesitant, effortful beginning. He can see a desirable direction and has started to move towards it, but seeing the light does not guarantee that he can reach it. ^[13][14]

The animals arrive successively. First comes the swift spotted creature that obstructs him and repeatedly makes him consider turning back. Morning, the season and the creature’s bright skin briefly sustain his hope. Then the lion approaches with raised head and violent hunger. The she-wolf completes the reversal: her insatiability so overwhelms him that he loses hope of gaining the height. She pushes him down towards the place where the sun is silent. ^[13][14]

Blake gathers these separate appearances into a single confrontation. We do not have to wait for the next animal to enter, as a reader of the poem does. All three already possess the slope, and their combined presence explains the violence of Dante’s gesture. The distant brightness remains visible alongside the blocked ascent, holding hope and its defeat within one view. ^[1][13]

The scene occurs before Dante’s guided passage through Hell. He has not yet crossed its gate or entered one of its circles. These first obstacles belong to the crisis that makes the longer journey necessary. The distinction matters because the picture’s monsters can otherwise make it look like an encounter deep inside the infernal world. Here the traveller still hopes to escape by climbing directly towards daylight. ^[13]

The three beasts

The lowest animal has a pale body marked with patches of red, blue and yellow. Its head is low, its forelegs bent, and its long tail curls upwards at the right. Above it, the lion’s thick mane makes a conspicuous ring around its face. Higher still, the she-wolf has an elongated muzzle, visible teeth and hanging teats beneath her body. Blake gives the three animals distinct outlines and textures while directing their attention towards the same endangered man. ^[1]

Their arrangement turns a sequence into something like a rising barrier. The spotted animal fills the foreground, the lion holds the middle level and the wolf reaches into the space beneath the canopy. They do not stand in a neat line across a road. Instead, they occupy the available terrain so thoroughly that Dante seems unable to find an opening around them. The lowest creature’s crouch is particularly effective: even the space close to the ground has become difficult to cross. ^[1]

The spotted beast has different names in different translations. Dante calls it a lonza, describing its quickness and marked coat. Henry Francis Cary’s English version calls it a panther; the NGV’s label uses leopard. Those terms identify the same first obstacle in this episode. Blake’s unusual painted animal should be approached through its visible markings and narrative place, without expecting an exact modern zoological portrait. ^[13][14][15]

The poem also makes the animals morally charged. The she-wolf is thin yet full of desire, and feeding only increases her hunger. This is appetite that cannot be satisfied, rather than an ordinary animal’s need for food. Blake’s wolf has a substantial body and strongly visible teats, so its painted appearance does not reproduce every descriptive feature of Dante’s lean creature. The literary account and the visual form remain related without becoming interchangeable. ^[1][13]

The NGV’s 2014 label offers paired readings of the beasts: worldly pleasure or Florence for the leopard; pride or the French royal house for the lion; avarice or the papacy for the wolf. These are moral and political interpretations of Dante’s figures. These alternatives preserve more than one level of reference, without fixing every detail of Blake’s composition. ^[15]

The immediate drama remains intelligible before those equations are applied. A man wants to ascend; dangerous creatures force him back. Desire, fear and obstruction have taken bodily form. The symbolism gains force from that encounter, because the viewer first understands how thoroughly a path can be closed. ^[1][13]

One body pulled in two directions

Dante’s robe runs diagonally across the lower left of the image. Its long folds gather near the ground, while one bare foot reaches towards the lower right. His upper body turns upwards and his raised hands open on either side of his head. The pose spreads his alarm across a surprisingly large area of the sheet. He occupies less space than the beasts together, yet his gesture answers their collective force. ^[1]

His head remains turned towards the animals while his body sweeps away from them. Looking and movement have separated. That divided posture makes retreat feel difficult: Dante cannot simply turn his back on the danger and leave it behind. The raised arms also interrupt any comfortable reading of the scene as an ordinary walk through a landscape. They make the encounter urgent before we identify a particular beast. ^[1]

Virgil appears behind him, higher in the picture, his pale blue clothing opening around a much lighter central robe. His hands extend towards the frightened traveller. He brings a second human presence into a field dominated by animals and trees, but he carries no visible weapon. The help he will give in the poem depends on recognition, explanation and guidance. ^[1][13]

At first Dante does not know whether he is seeing a living man or a shade. Virgil identifies himself through his birthplace, his Roman lifetime and his poem about the son of Anchises. Dante then recognises the author whose work he has studied with love. His appeal for immediate rescue becomes an encounter with an admired poetic predecessor. The figure who can help him is already part of his imaginative life. ^[13]

Virgil does not offer to defeat the beasts and reopen the direct ascent. He tells Dante that another journey is necessary. His proposed route will pass through the suffering of the dead and the hopeful fires of Purgatory; beyond that, a worthier spirit must take over. From its first offer, the guidance has limits. Virgil can lead a long way, but cannot personally deliver Dante into the highest realm. ^[13][14]

This gives the bright horizon an unresolved role. It presents something desirable without supplying an easy passage to it. The picture holds the instant when a failed ascent becomes the occasion for a different route, and a solitary traveller begins to acquire a companion. ^[1][13]

Sunrise, sea and the edge of the world

Blake opens the background between the figures and the wooded slope. Narrow bands of blue and pink water run towards a distant shoreline. A pale solar disc rises behind the hill, sending long rays through the sky. At the left, stars remain visible in a darker blue region. The image allows the remnants of night and the arrival of morning to share the same expanse. ^[1]

The trees frame that opening. A pale trunk bends in from the upper left, while darker branches and dense green foliage spread across the upper right. Their arch joins the two sides without making them equally welcoming. On the right, the canopy shelters the beasts and presses down towards them. On the left, the open water gives space around Virgil’s pale figure. Colour and density help distinguish the source of danger from the arrival of assistance. ^[1]

Hayley Flynn draws attention to the sea as a landscape element that Dante does not specify as the setting of this opening encounter. She reads its addition as placing the journey at the edges of the earth. In her wider account, Blake gives the Comedy a connected physical world through which the travellers can move. The water and horizon here help make the opening scene a departure point within such a world. ^[16]

The poem does contain a sea comparison. Having escaped the frightening wood, Dante likens himself to a breathless swimmer who reaches the shore and turns to stare at the dangerous water. This occurs before the beasts block his climb. Blake’s visible sea and Dante’s figurative sea can therefore be considered together, while Flynn’s point about the absence of a stated coastal setting still stands. The painting makes water an actual part of the place, where the poem uses it to describe a state of mind. ^[13][14][16]

That relationship deepens the picture’s pattern of looking backwards. The swimmer turns towards the danger he has survived; the painted Dante turns towards a danger still confronting him. In both cases the body’s change of position fails to bring immediate mental release. Blake’s landscape gives that difficulty an extensive setting, with enough open space to suggest escape and enough obstruction to deny it. ^[1][13]

An earlier image and a changed stage

Flynn also compares Dante’s pose with an anonymous woodcut associated with Alessandro Vellutello’s illustrated Dante. Her article reproduces the earlier design as a work of about 1544 and identifies the outstretched arms and alarmed turn of the head as a precedent. The resemblance is visible in her comparison: both figures make fear legible through an expansive gesture while facing an animal on a wooded incline. Flynn argues for a direct borrowing; that relationship remains her scholarly judgement. ^[16]

Blake’s setting gives the pose a different reach. His broad horizontal sheet opens beyond the figures to coloured water, a low horizon and the rising sun. The animals spread across separate levels, and Virgil’s pale blue form rises behind Dante’s red one. The frightened gesture belongs to an environment in which light, distance and blocked movement can all be experienced together. The earlier image helps us recognise a possible inherited action; Blake’s arrangement makes the entire landscape participate in it. ^[1][16]

A finished opening to an unfinished series

John Linnell commissioned the Dante illustrations in 1824. At Blake’s death in 1827, the undertaking comprised 102 watercolours at different stages of completion and seven unfinished engravings. The NGV’s exhibition label describes this opening design as one of the few watercolours brought to a completely finished state. Its strong colour and extensively articulated figures give the opening scene an unusual visual fullness. ^[1][15]

Its place at the beginning is a narrative position. It does not prove that Blake painted this sheet first or completed the illustrations in the order of the poem. The current catalogue number, Butlin 812.1, distinguishes it from the next design, Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest, catalogued as 812.2. Tate’s catalogue identifies that later scene with renewed consent at Inferno II, 139–142, after Dante’s confidence has faltered again. ^[1][13][17]

The opening sheet thus leaves more to happen than its vivid encounter might suggest. Virgil’s appearance has changed what is possible, but Dante will still need persuasion before he can continue. Here Blake keeps the opposing forces visible at once: the desired light, the animals holding the slope, the body recoiling and the guide extending his hands. The journey begins when the obvious way has failed. ^[1][13]