Dante's Divine Comedy

Two travellers disappear between enormous trees. Farther on, a three-headed creature fills a cavern; a giant bends to lower his passengers into an abyss; a kneeling poet brings his face towards a stream of light. William Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy make reading feel like travelling. A change in the size of a body, the shape of a path or the pressure of the sky tells us that we have entered another part of the journey. ^[1][2][3][4]

The project occupied Blake from 1824 until his death in 1827. It survives as 102 designs in different stages of development, together with seven engraved compositions. Some sheets glow with closely worked colour; others remain lightly drawn. Together they offer an encounter between Dante’s account of judgement and salvation and an artist who could enter its imaginative world while questioning its premises. ^[5][6][7][8]

A commission that became a last absorbing task

John Linnell commissioned the Dante illustrations in 1824. A painter and engraver himself, he had already become an important supporter of Blake’s later work. The Morgan’s chronology places their meeting in 1818, the beginning of the Dante project six years later, and the issue of the Dante prints after Blake’s death. The commission grew out of a friendship that had already sustained another substantial project. ^[5][19]

A letter postmarked 2 July 1826 gives the project a strikingly portable form. Planning a visit to Linnell’s family, Blake intended to take his book of Dante drawings and one plate enclosed within it, alongside the necessary change of clothes. Cold weather and weakness made him postpone the journey. The proposed luggage brings drawing and engraving together within everyday arrangements: the book was something he could carry, reopen and continue working through away from home. ^[20]

Blake’s letters let us enter that relationship at the worktable. In February 1827 he thanked Linnell for five pounds and described himself as slowly improving in health. He had four Dante plates with him and asked for the two Linnell held, so that he could develop their strength. His phrase “Shew of Colour & Strength” concerns engraving: the force and tonal effect he was seeking in a medium that would ordinarily print in one ink. The plates were still objects being worked upon, moved between artist and patron, and tested. ^[20]

A letter of 15 March brings a visitor into the room. Blake reported that Tatham senior had looked through both the designs and the engravings and expressed pleasure in them. In the same letter, he passed on George Cumberland’s report that some Bristol viewers found the Job engravings too finished or overworked. Different projects, audiences and judgements occupied these last months. Dante was being made alongside the continuing effort to find readers and buyers for other work. ^[21]

By 25 April, Blake could tell Linnell that he had taken proofs of six plates and prepared the fighting devils for engraving on copper. His own words express the project’s hold on him: “I am too much attachd to Dante to think much of any thing else”. The letter combines that attachment with thanks for ten pounds, anxiety about the future and concern that he might disappoint his friends. Absorption did not remove the practical circumstances that made the work possible. ^[22]

Catherine Blake also appears in that letter. Discussing Ugolino and related works, Blake credited his wife with their having reached a finished state. The letter does not specify her tasks, but his account of the work’s completion plainly includes her help. ^[22]

The letters trace the unfinished project’s development. Four plates in one place and two in another become six proved plates, with another composition being reduced for copper. These are stages in an undertaking, not a retrospective list of seven equally finished masterpieces. The surviving works ask us to keep their continuing development in view, even when a reproduction makes each image look like a settled, self-contained picture. ^[20][22][6]

What the 102 designs and seven engravings mean

The conventional census divides the drawn series into seventy-two illustrations to Inferno, twenty to Purgatorio and ten to Paradiso. The National Gallery of Victoria describes all 102 as watercolours in varying states of completion. That convenient collective name needs a little flexibility: individual catalogues distinguish graphite, chalk, pen, ink and watercolour, and some sheets carry much more developed colour than others. A series of 102 designs is not a series of 102 fully finished watercolour paintings. ^[5][1][9]

The second design, Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest, combines graphite, ink and watercolour on a sheet measuring 371 × 527 mm. Dante in the Empyrean, Drinking at the River of Light is an upright sheet of graphite and watercolour, 528 × 371 mm. These are individual works on paper, with their own dimensions, inscriptions and degrees of elaboration. Their shared project does not erase those material differences. ^[1][4]

Seven compositions reached copper. All come from Inferno: the lovers’ whirlwind; two episodes involving the devils and corrupt officials; the six-footed serpent’s attack; the encounter between Buoso and the serpent; the falsifiers; and Dante striking against Bocca among the traitors. The selection carries us from the second circle to the frozen region near the bottom of Hell. It gives no engraved equivalent of the ascent through Purgatory or the final approach to celestial light. ^[6]

A copper plate is the engraved printing surface. An impression is a sheet printed from it. The distinction matters here because impressions were taken during Blake’s lifetime and in later printings. Tate’s historical catalogue discusses the 1838 issue, a further printing associated with 1892, and later Rosenwald printings. Its A00005 group is catalogued 1826–7/1892: the first dates concern Blake’s engraved work, while the later date concerns the physical impressions in that set. ^[6]

The copper itself can still be studied. The National Gallery of Art holds the engraved plate for The Circle of the Lustful: Paolo and Francesca, accession 1943.3.1743. Its metal surface belongs to a different kind of encounter from looking at an impression on paper. A title can refer to the design shared by both objects, but a collection, medium or printing date must belong to the particular object being described. ^[23]

The two lovers’ pages make this especially clear. The Lovers’ Whirlwind follows the Birmingham watercolour, whereas The Circle of the Lustful, Paolo and Francesca concerns the engraved composition. They are related versions of one episode. Birmingham’s sheet does not acquire the date of a later printed impression, and an engraving does not become a watercolour because its original design was painted. ^[6]

Following the journey

Dante begins as a living traveller who has lost his way. Virgil guides him through Hell and up the mountain of Purgatory. At the Earthly Paradise, Beatrice takes over the guiding role; the journey then moves into the heavens. Those changes of companion and environment help a reader navigate Blake’s sequence. A red or blue robe can identify a traveller across images, while a cliff, shore or opening supplies the next physical problem to be negotiated. ^[24][18][25]

The distribution of the designs gives Hell particular weight. Yet the remaining stages change the experience of the series profoundly. In Inferno, bodies are driven, torn, enclosed or transformed. The mountain gives Dante a strenuous path upwards, with room to look back towards the sea. The river of light makes bodily action the means of changing perception. To stop with the most frightening monsters would miss the different forms of movement that follow them. ^{[5][26][27][25]}

Hayley Flynn argues that Blake’s landscapes join episodes into a convincing journey. Comparing his designs with John Flaxman’s outline illustrations, she emphasises the space surrounding an encounter: the route across a bridge, the depth of a gulf or the changing view of a mountain. ^[28]

Cary’s English translation, published in 1814, gave Blake a verbal route into the poem alongside Italian material. Flynn relates its spacious descriptions to his landscape settings. Translation can help shape an image’s height, distance and continuity. ^[28]

Flynn also identifies possible debts to woodcuts in Alessandro Vellutello’s sixteenth-century edition, recorded among Blake’s possessions. She compares its running Dante and mountainous Purgatory with Blake’s versions. His imagination encountered books already illustrated, as well as the words they carried. ^[28]

That approach rewards a simple habit. Before identifying every figure, find the travellers and ask how they reached their present position. Look for a path continuing out of view or a change in level. In the forest and the mountain ascent, the travellers’ relations to trees and rock give their positions a bodily urgency. Blake’s people inhabit places through which a living body must somehow pass. ^[1][27]

The forest: setting out together

Dante Running from the Three Beasts opens the series with danger and interrupted movement. In Inferno I, the traveller tries to climb towards the sunlight but meets a leopard, a lion and a she-wolf. The wolf drives him back. Virgil offers another route, through the regions of the dead. Escape requires an immense detour through the very world the poem will describe. ^[5][24]

The next design, Dante and Virgil Penetrating the Forest, answers that alarm with companionship. The pair stand close together inside an arch made by bending trunks and branches. One body inclines towards the other; the forest frames their exchange. Thickly drawn trees occupy much more of the sheet than the travellers, yet their sheltering curve also makes a passage. The place can be entered, although its depths remain difficult to see. ^[1]

The relevant moment comes at the end of Inferno II, after Dante has almost withdrawn from the undertaking. He doubts whether he deserves the kind of journey made by Aeneas and Saint Paul. Virgil replies by explaining that Beatrice sent him, and that her intervention belongs to a chain of heavenly concern. The canto restores Dante’s courage through an account of help already given. Its final movement into the wood follows a renewed declaration of trust. ^[24]

This context gives the small meeting beneath the trees emotional substance. The picture belongs to a moment when another person’s guidance makes action possible. It need not show the entire conversation to preserve its consequence. The travellers face the same opening, and their proximity gives the dark route a human point of entry. The wide expanse of the wood now contains a pair who will move together. ^[1][24]

The sheet’s unfinished condition contributes to its present appearance. Some trunks have emphatic dark edges; others remain light, their interiors almost continuous with the paper. Faint blue and green washes touch the surrounding space. Tate’s recent label contrasts those sunny washes with the carbon black of the wood ahead. The variation allows us to see several kinds of mark at once, from searching contour to much denser enclosure. ^[1]

Butlin’s catalogue suggests that the oak trees may evoke Druidical error. That remains a proposed symbolic association. The immediate narrative already explains why a wood matters, and the complete canto explains why entering it has become possible. Beginning there preserves the image’s intelligibility before adding a more specialised account of Blake’s associations with trees. ^[1][24]

The gate and the ancient poets

The entrance to Hell changes a route into a declaration. In The Inscription over the Gate, the threshold bears words denying hope to those who enter. Inferno III places that terrible statement before the encounter with the uncommitted souls and the crossing of Acheron. Dante needs reassurance even to pass the inscription: Virgil takes his hand and leads him in. Guidance again takes a bodily form. ^[10][29]

Blake’s Italian wording differs from Dante’s, and Tate’s catalogue regards the accompanying literal translation as his own. This is a small but useful example of how closely an illustration can engage with words while altering them. A visitor looking only for an atmospheric entrance might miss that the written surface itself belongs to Blake’s interpretation. The gate is read within the poem and read again within the picture. ^[10]

The same catalogue records a disagreement about the world visible beyond it. Albert S. Roe interpreted the image as equating Dante’s Hell with material creation. David Fuller challenged that conclusion, arguing that Blake’s later understanding of creation was more complex. The dispute cautions against making an immense theological claim from the landscape alone. The pictured threshold has a precise place in Dante’s sequence, even while its breadth invites further interpretation. ^[10]

Homer and the Ancient Poets offers a more explicit point of friction. In Inferno IV, Dante meets Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan. They welcome him into their distinguished company, making him the sixth alongside Virgil. Their honour is real within the poem, although their lack of Christian faith leaves them in Limbo, desiring without hope. Admiration and exclusion inhabit the same encounter. ^[29][11]

Blake places the ancient poets beneath dense foliage while Dante and Virgil occupy a high ledge. Airborne figures move in an opening between wooded masses. The view is divided by height, vegetation and cloud; the honoured company does not possess the whole field of vision. Butlin’s catalogue relates the grove to Blake’s criticism of classical poetry’s service to war. It also records Fuller’s warning that the flying figures have a basis in Dante’s text. Even a convincing critical reading must account for what the poet supplied. ^[11]

Dante uses the encounter to imagine his relationship to an inherited literary company. Blake makes that company part of an environment whose visible limits can themselves be questioned. The two artists’ ideas about poetic ancestry meet within one composition, without requiring every element of the picture to be translated into a fixed Blakean name. ^[29][11]

A storm of lovers and the weight of Cerberus

The lovers’ whirlwind brings movement into the centre of the image. Inferno V describes souls driven by violent winds, then narrows to Francesca’s account of reading the story of Lancelot with Paolo. At the end, Dante faints through compassion. Blake’s design gathers the storm into an enormous continuous curve and sets the fallen listener beside his upright guide. The poem’s succession of judgement, testimony and collapse becomes a composition that can be taken in at once. ^[30][6]

The Birmingham watercolour deserves its own close reading. Within the larger series, its importance lies partly in that change of scale: a crowd borne by one current, an intimate story and a single body overcome by listening. The engraved version carries the same episode into an exacting arrangement of lines. These related works show how a design could preserve its broad imaginative structure while changing its material address to the viewer. ^[6][30]

Cerberus then gives appetite an enormous body. In the Tate Cerberus, the creature’s forepaws press against the lower edge, while its three heads occupy a widening fan above the chest. Dark rock bears down from overhead. The two travellers at the right seem almost incidental in scale, but their smallness makes the obstruction formidable. This is a passage guarded by something that appears to consume the space around it. ^[2]

The sixth canto places the monster among the gluttons, beneath a relentless fall of cold rain, hail and dirty water. Cerberus tears the prostrate souls. Virgil scoops up earth and throws it into his mouths, distracting him as food distracts a barking dog. The poets then step across shades who seem substantial but are empty. The episode turns appetite into a degraded repetition without nourishment or satisfaction. ^[30]

Blake gives that encounter a cave, although Dante does not specify one. In the picture, the dark arch encloses the creature while a warmer, fiery opening glows behind it. The change makes the guardian and its setting feel inseparable. Its forequarters fill the cavity as though the rock had been shaped around its bulk. We can register the obstacle before identifying any individual punished soul. ^[2]

Tate compares its sheet with another Cerberus watercolour in Melbourne. Roe proposed that the Melbourne version had been abandoned because the monster was insufficiently formidable; Butlin’s catalogue observes that it appears to show a slightly later narrative moment, when Virgil is feeding it. Similar subjects can therefore mark consecutive actions. A difference in composition does not automatically prove that one version was rejected as a failure. ^[2]

The rest of Inferno VI also matters. Dante speaks with Ciacco about Florence and its divisions, before asking Virgil whether the final resurrection will intensify the sufferers’ pain. A spectacular monster is only one part of a canto concerned with civic discord, memory and the body’s future. Blake’s concentrated image isolates the guardian from that longer discussion. Reading the canto restores the human voices on the other side of its spectacle. ^[30]

Wealth, violence and the sale of sacred things

The journey brings repeated encounters with misused power. Plutus stands at the boundary of the fourth circle, clutching a money-sack. Tate’s catalogue connects the design with Blake’s attack on the domination of art by money in his Laocoön inscription. The sack gives a general subject a concrete possession: wealth becomes something held close to a body at a threshold. ^[12]

Tate’s later discussion also identifies antisemitic physiognomic conventions in the figure. Those conventions belong to the history of the image and its interpretation; they are prejudicial stereotypes, not evidence about Jewish people. Blake’s criticism of wealth does not make that visual vocabulary harmless. A useful account can recognise the social force of a figure’s appearance while refusing to repeat its assumptions as truths. ^[12]

The Wood of the Harpies and the Suicides changes the relation between body and landscape again. In Dante’s thirteenth canto, the souls of people who died by suicide become trees. A broken branch releases speech and blood. The punishment belongs to the poem’s medieval moral world; its historical title should not become a judgement on people who die by suicide. ^[13][31]

Dante gives the suffering tree a voice and a request. Pier delle Vigne asks the returning traveller to restore his reputation, while Virgil acknowledges the injury caused when he prompted Dante to break the branch. Landscape becomes a person whose testimony has been reached through harm. This matters within the series because the forest’s strange anatomy carries an encounter with an individual, not merely an illustration of a category. ^[31]

The Simoniac Pope is more openly accusatory. In Inferno XIX, churchmen who sold sacred things are thrust head first into holes, their feet burning above them. Pope Nicholas III mistakes Dante for the successor whose arrival will push him farther down. Dante rebukes him for turning spiritual authority into a source of wealth, and Virgil carries the living visitor back up the difficult slope. ^[14][26]

Blake places the scene in a cavern, concentrating its darkness and its physical reversals. Butlin observes that the inversion of spiritual and material values could accord with Blake’s own concerns. This is a specific area of sympathy between illustrator and poet. Dante’s presence in Hell already includes a fierce indictment of ecclesiastical corruption; Blake did not have to oppose Dante in order to make this episode severe. ^[14]

The thieves: a body that can be taken away

The thieves occupy the seventh trench of the eighth circle. Their punishments develop across two cantos: snakes bind bodies, a bitten soul burns to ashes and reforms, and human and reptilian identities mingle or exchange. Dante makes the visible body unstable. A person can lose the shape by which others recognise him, yet remain exposed to another round of suffering. ^[26]

Two different Blake subjects help us follow the sequence. The Punishment of the Thieves is catalogued as a general view of the pit, probably associated with Inferno XXIV, 77–95. Tate does not identify a single named episode in it. The work’s catalogue number, Butlin 812.102, should therefore not be mistaken for its position as the last event in Dante’s narrative. Catalogue arrangement and story order answer different questions. ^[9]

The Serpent Attacking Buoso Donati is more precise. The relevant watercolour is Tate N03361, and Blake also engraved the design. In the engraved version, a serpent lifts its head towards the exposed man at the right; between their mouths or bodies, curling smoke makes their exchange visible. Other figures watch from the side. The transformation is already an encounter between two gazes. ^[15][6]

The episode in Inferno XXV exceeds a simple attack. The serpent bites the man, smoke rises, and each begins taking the other’s form. Legs fuse into a tail as a tail divides; skin changes; a tongue splits while another becomes capable of speech. Dante pauses to challenge the metamorphoses described by Lucan and Ovid. His claim rests on the novelty of an exchange in which two beings surrender and acquire their substances together. ^[26]

Blake chooses the suspended moment before the process is complete. The opposing bodies are still readable as man and serpent, and their eye contact gives the impending exchange a terrible intimacy. His design can make us linger over a moment that the poem must carry forward through successive changes. The victim’s body is poised between familiar anatomy and a future that will unmake it. ^[15][26]

Tate identifies the serpent as Francesco de’ Cavalcanti, the victim as Buoso and the witness as Puccio Sciancato. Its catalogue points to the next watercolour, now at Harvard, for the completed transformation. That neighbouring image matters: the first sheet need not contain the entire event. The narrative connection between works allows a drawing to hold one unstable instant, then let another show what follows. ^[15]

The wider thieves picture has also attracted readings built around sex and gender. Butlin’s catalogue explicitly rejects Roe’s assumption that all its figures are women, while recording Fuller’s reading of the serpent attacks as assaults on personal identity. The distinction is consequential. A theory built upon a mistaken description of the bodies cannot be rescued merely by being elaborate. The poem’s transformations give us a secure starting point for the loss of self the images explore. ^[9][26]

The falsifiers and the giant’s hand

The Pit of Disease: The Falsifiers gathers material from Inferno XXIX and XXX. Two seated figures at the right scratch their diseased skin; farther left, bodies lie beneath an arch. Dante and Virgil stand high on an opposing ledge. Across the middle distance, mountains and fiery colours open a space beyond the immediate sufferers. The scene has room to breathe visually, although its inhabitants have little relief. ^[16]

Colour gives the bodily suffering an additional material presence. Tate’s technical caption identifies a red lake, probably brazilwood, and a gritty vermilion in the flames. It also notes vermilion in parts of the scratching figures’ raw flesh. The distinction brings the painter’s choices close to the represented injury: different red pigments have different handling properties, even where a small reproduction seems to offer one continuous fiery tone. The bodies and the surrounding Hell share colour without becoming the same surface. ^[16]

The two cantos distinguish different acts of falsification and different afflictions. Griffolino and Capocchio are encountered scraping their skin; Master Adam suffers disabling swelling and thirst; Sinon and the false accuser of Joseph lie nearby. Blake can bring these dispersed observations into a single field. Tate’s catalogue accordingly treats some identifications on the left as possibilities, while confidently naming the scratching pair. Certainty should vary with the evidence within the same picture. ^[26][16]

The arch itself is unsettling. Human forms seem incorporated into the stone at the left, their bodies piled into a support over bodies lying below. Butlin reads such petrified figures as Fallen Man removed from divine energy. Visually, their fusion with the setting extends the sufferers’ helplessness into the architecture. The place where people suffer appears to have been made from people who can no longer act. ^[16]

Dante’s own narrative asks questions about looking. At the end of canto XXX, Virgil rebukes the pilgrim for taking too much interest in a degrading quarrel. A viewer of Blake’s horrors faces a related difficulty: attention can recognise another’s pain, but it can also become appetite for spectacle. The presence of the travellers gives these images witnesses whose responses remain part of the story. ^[26]

Antaeus Setting Down Dante and Virgil returns the journey to a practical problem of passage. Near the end of Inferno XXXI, Virgil persuades the giant to lower them into the final circle. Dante compares the bending figure to a leaning tower seen beneath a passing cloud. The NGV’s catalogue connects Blake’s image with that comparison and with the giant’s subsequent straightening like a ship’s mast. Size becomes a means of transport as well as a source of fear. ^[3][26]

Climbing towards Purgatory

The upright format of The Ascent of the Mountain of Purgatory makes a different demand on the eye. Rock rises along the left, while the sea stretches away on the right. Dante stands below Virgil, reaching upwards. The higher figure turns towards him. Their separation measures effort: the same short stretch of the picture that an eye can cross at once must be climbed by a tired body. ^[17]

In Purgatorio IV, the narrow route requires hands and feet. Dante falls behind and asks his guide to wait; Virgil urges him towards a ledge. They have not yet passed the gate of Purgatory proper. The distinction prevents a common compression of the geography: climbing the mountain’s approaches and entering the region of purgation are successive stages. Blake’s design fixes the fatigue of the earlier ascent. ^[17][27]

The canto eventually allows a rest and a look back. Dante wonders at the sun’s position, and Virgil explains their place on the opposite side of the earth from Jerusalem. Geography, bodily effort and instruction belong together. Flynn’s attention to Blake’s repeated mountain, sea and sky helps us see how an image can preserve that relation. The exposed route is part of a coherent world, with a horizon below it and changing light above. ^[27][28]

The partly obscured sun has sometimes been made evidence of Blake’s disapproval. Yet the open sea, great height and continuing path also carry the scene’s immediate narrative. The travellers are proceeding towards a destination. Darkness in a cloud does not settle the moral meaning of everything beneath it; its role has to be tested against the particular episode and the sequence surrounding it. ^[17][7]

Dante and Virgil Approaching the Angel Who Guards the Entrance of Purgatory makes arrival monumental. The travellers stand together on a narrow approach beside the sea. Above them, a tall pointed doorway contains the faintly drawn angel. Three broad steps, white, dark and red, separate their position from his. A large, dark-edged cloud moves across the sky like another shaped presence. ^[7]

The ninth canto supplies the gate, the angel and the materials of the steps: polished white marble, dark cracked stone and red porphyry. It continues beyond the moment Blake pictures. Dante humbly asks admission, receives seven marks on his forehead and passes through a gate unlocked with two keys. The angel says he has been instructed by Peter to err towards opening it, provided the petitioner asks humbly. The keeper’s generosity accompanies the formidable conditions of entry. ^[27]

Roe identified Blake’s angel with Urizen and interpreted the veiled sun as a sign of opposition to Dante’s spiritual order. Butlin records Fuller’s challenge: the identification is insecure, and Dante’s own imagery can account for the sun. The disagreement changes how we look. An aged, bearded figure can resemble forms elsewhere in Blake without necessarily carrying one unchanging identity across every work. The scene’s precise textual setting deserves to remain active. ^[7]

Beatrice and the difficulty of a single meaning

Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Car makes the Earthly Paradise flare with movement and colour. Beatrice stands high within a spreading arrangement of eye-covered wings. A gryphon occupies the right; at the left, three women stand beside or move towards a wheel-like vortex. Dante faces the company from the opposite edge. The composition gathers looking, dancing, pointing and revelation around the commanding central figure. ^[8]

The relevant narrative unfolds across Purgatorio XXIX–XXXI. First comes the procession: lights, elders, four living creatures and a chariot drawn by the gryphon. Beatrice appears, and Dante discovers that Virgil has gone. Her greeting becomes a rebuke of the ways he abandoned after her death. He confesses, collapses and is drawn through Lethe before being brought to look again. The episode moves from ceremonial splendour through grief and shame towards renewed vision. ^[18]

That span helps explain why the picture is difficult to assign to one instant. Its inscription names cantos XXIX and XXX, while its arrangement also answers the later action of canto XXXI. Fuller, as discussed in Tate’s catalogue, places particular weight on Dante’s position after crossing Lethe and on Beatrice’s unveiling. A composite image can remember earlier descriptions while showing an action that occurs later. Its differences from one isolated passage do not all constitute departures from the poem. ^[8][18]

The question has produced sharply different interpretations. Roe read the picture as poetic genius subjected to a coercive female will, identifying Beatrice with figures from Blake’s own mythology. Fuller challenged that network of identifications and returned to the poem, biblical sources and familiar Christian iconography. Butlin’s catalogue presents both, finding that Fuller’s account better accommodates the glowing picture’s generally joyful effect. These are arguments about the image, not names silently supplied by the image itself. ^[8]

Dante explicitly directs his reader to Ezekiel when describing the living creatures. Blake’s eye-covered wings thus belong to a biblical field of vision already opened by the poem. The three women’s colours also answer Dante’s white, green and fiery red. Tate identifies them as Faith, Hope and Charity. Their individuality matters: Faith points towards a book; Charity is accompanied by small children; Hope extends herself in movement. The group gives the virtues actions that a viewer can follow. ^[18][8]

The great spiral at the left is especially arresting. Its turning bands gather colours and reflected forms into an apparent wheel without producing the reassuring solidity of a cart. Fuller connects its radiance with the light surrounding the procession, while the catalogue brings in Ezekiel’s extraordinary wheels. Blake makes the vehicle’s movement look like an event in perception. The eye is carried around it before settling again on the figures. ^[8]

A gold crown replaces Beatrice’s olive wreath. Roe treated the change as evidence of domination; Fuller related it to Blake’s response to Dante’s association of the wreath with Minerva. The visible substitution is secure, but its significance remains argued. Keeping those two levels separate allows the detail to stay interesting. We can recognise Blake’s alteration without pretending that one agreed interpretation follows from it. ^[8]

Nor should the picture’s splendour erase the force of Beatrice’s speech. Dante makes her exacting, and his experience includes grief at Virgil’s absence and painful self-recognition. The composition can look radiant while the story remains demanding. A faithful account of this meeting needs room for both its beauty and its severity, just as a responsible account of Blake’s response needs room for invention and close attention to the source. ^[18][8]

Drinking at the river of light

The upright Dante in the Empyrean, Drinking at the River of Light changes the register again. A narrow stream descends through the centre. Dante kneels at the lower left, bending towards it, while Beatrice sits opposite. Flowers gather near his feet; small figures animate the stream and its banks. Higher presences remain lightly drawn within pale colour. The scene feels open, although its central current gives the sheet a clear direction. ^[4]

In Paradiso XXX, Dante has entered a heaven of unbodied light. At first its radiance overwhelms his sight. He then sees a river, flowering banks and living sparks moving between water and flowers. Beatrice explains that what he sees is a preliminary appearance suited to his present capacity. He must drink before he can understand more fully. The splendour is inseparable from a change in the person looking at it. ^[25]

Cary’s translation makes the act unusually intimate: Dante bends towards the stream as eagerly as a hungry child towards milk, and his eyelids drink. The river then appears to turn from length into a circle, while flowers and sparks disclose the heavenly company they had veiled. This is an education of vision through desire and contact. Blake’s kneeling body gives that immense change a small, legible action. ^[25][4]

The light handling of colour also leaves the paper active. Blue-green washes and faint yellow areas surround lines that have not all been reinforced. The upper figures emerge gently from the surface instead of occupying a fully modelled celestial building. That is the sheet’s surviving condition; it should not be assumed that every pale area represents a deliberate final effect. Yet the unfinished work now lets us see how economically a flowing line and a little colour can establish an immense space. ^[4]

Blake adds figures absent from Dante’s account. Tate’s catalogue associates the upper left with the arts, including a poet and artistic work, and reports Roe’s larger reading of Art and Nature raised into eternity. Its recent label offers the broader possibility that spiritual forms of Art and Nature are present. Those suggestions are useful when kept as suggestions. The extra figures extend the scene towards Blake’s concerns without making every lightly sketched body securely identifiable. ^[4]

Their presence also changes the emotional range of the project. The artist who pictured bodily disintegration and trapped movement could imagine creative activity within heavenly light. The river does not need to be reduced to a private emblem before this becomes visible. Dante’s thirst, the pictured act of drinking and the surrounding figures already make the scene a place of participation. It answers the early forest’s hesitant entry with a different kind of readiness to receive. ^[4][25][24]

When Blake disagrees

Blake’s written notes make clear that disagreement was part of the encounter. On his diagram of the nine circles, he questions whether the Father or Jesus could have created the Hell attributed to divine justice. He invokes a God who gives sun and rain to the just and unjust alike, then places vengeance and opposition to forgiveness on the side of Satan the accuser. The note addresses a precise theological problem: how punishment relates to divine generosity. ^[32]

It belongs on the same page as the patient attention to landscapes, gestures and canto details. Blake could challenge the moral structure of the journey while continuing to imagine its places with great commitment. His diagram even discusses how the arrangement changes when viewed from Hell’s gate or from Purgatory after passing the centre. A drawing that asks how to orient the traveller also asks how to understand the world being traversed. ^[32]

The note helps establish a real difference between Blake and Dante, but it cannot dictate the meaning of every cloud, crown or bearded angel. Those details still require the local readings offered by the poem and the picture. Sympathy, invention and resistance change their proportions from one scene to another. ^[32][7][8]

An unfinished series with a continuing material life

Blake’s death on 12 August 1827 ended the work. The drawings retained their different degrees of finish, and the engravings retained evidence of development. Robert N. Essick’s review of Blake Books states that none of the Dante plates was completed before Blake died; Tate’s catalogue is particularly clear about the unfinished fighting devils, while allowing that he might have intended further work on the others. Seven surviving engraved compositions should never be made to mean seven plates he declared finished. ^[19][33][6]

Later printing gave those unfinished surfaces a public life. Linnell’s 1838 issue presented the seven subjects with quotations and canto references from Cary. The label named Blake as designer and engraver and connected the set with his Job illustrations. It offered readers a small selection from the larger drawn sequence, all concentrated in Hell. A printed set could circulate independently of the book of drawings from which the project had developed. ^[6]

The drawings remained with the Linnell family until their auction sale in 1918. Tate records the entire Dante group in lot 148 at Christie’s on 15 March, and its sheets subsequently entered the collection through the National Art-Collections Fund with help from public and private donors. The NGV acquired thirty-six designs, the largest group; the remainder were divided among Harvard’s Fogg Museum and British collections including Tate, the British Museum, Birmingham, the Ashmolean and the Royal Institution of Cornwall. ^[1][5]

That dispersal explains why a visit to one museum gives only part of the journey. Tate’s forest, Beatrice and river belong to the same enterprise as Melbourne’s fleeing Dante and bending Antaeus and Birmingham’s whirlwind. To reconstruct their narrative relations requires looking across collections. An accession number anchors one sheet; the canto and series context return it to a larger company. ^{[1][5][3][8][4]}

The incomplete state is part of what makes that company compelling. A firmly drawn monster and a barely established heavenly figure can stand at very different stages of execution while belonging to one sustained act of attention. Blake’s letters preserve an artist still improving plates, requesting them back and imagining their strength. The works preserve the wider search: how to give another poet’s journey bodies, distances, obstacles and light. ^{[20][22][1][2][4]}