The Lovers' Whirlwind

A coil of human bodies fills the left side of William Blake’s The Lovers’ Whirlwind. Figures are swept along a pale, curling current, their limbs following its bends, their hands reaching towards other bodies. Across a dark ledge, a man stands beside another who has fallen to the ground. Above them, two small figures appear within a brilliant sphere. The eye moves between the crowded storm and that almost dazzling stillness, between suffering shared by many and an encounter involving just four people. Blake brings the scale of Hell into contact with the vulnerability of a single listener. ^[1][2]

The subject comes from the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno: the meeting of Dante and his guide Virgil with Francesca da Rimini and Paolo, the lovers condemned to an unending storm. Blake’s watercolour belongs to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and dates from his final years, 1824–27. Its swirling forms give the punishment a memorable shape, while its extraordinary light leaves room for a more hopeful understanding of the lovers’ bond. ^[1][2]

A watercolour with more than one familiar title

The Lovers’ Whirlwind is also known as The Whirlwind of Lovers and The Circle of the Lustful: Francesca da Rimini. The Birmingham watercolour is the work identified as Butlin 812.10 in Tate’s catalogue discussion. It should be distinguished from Blake’s related engraving, which carries much the same subject and is often reproduced under similar titles. The watercolour measures approximately 37 by 52 centimetres; the Museum of Modern Art’s 1956 exhibition catalogue records it as 14½ by 20½ inches and reproduces the composition with its Birmingham collection credit. ^[1][2]

The image belongs to the Dante project commissioned by the painter and patron John Linnell in 1824. Blake continued working on it until his death in 1827, leaving designs at different stages of development. Watercolour allowed the settings of this imagined journey to acquire atmosphere as well as outline. Here, deep blue surrounds a pale torrent of figures, and the light above Virgil seems to penetrate the surrounding darkness. The landscape is sparse, but it determines where bodies can stand, fall or be carried. ^[1][14]

That distinction between standing and being carried is one of the picture’s foundations. Virgil occupies the bank; the condemned souls have no secure footing. Their naked bodies enter a system of movement far larger than themselves. Even before their story is known, the difference between the travellers and the passing spirits is visible. ^[1]

The story Francesca tells

In Inferno V, Dante descends into the second circle of Hell, where Minos assigns arriving souls their places of punishment. Further on, an incessant wind buffets those who allowed desire to overcome reason. In Henry Francis Cary’s translation, the spirits are people in whom “Reason by lust is sway’d.” Their inability to govern their movement gives bodily form to the moral condition Dante describes. There is no prospect of rest or even of a milder punishment. ^[3]

Dante’s account does not begin with Paolo and Francesca alone. Virgil identifies a succession of figures associated with destructive love, including Dido, Cleopatra, Helen and Tristan. Their stories extend the scene beyond one unhappy couple. Blake likewise makes the lovers’ encounter part of a much larger community of suffering, although the individual figures in his densely populated whirlwind need not all be assigned names. ^[1][3]

Dante asks to speak to two spirits who travel together. They leave the others and approach like doves returning to their nest. Francesca explains that love brought them to the same death and that the man beside her still remains with her. The familiar historical account, summarised by Tate, identifies Paolo as her husband’s brother and the husband as the killer of both lovers. The poem itself conveys the violence through Francesca’s compressed testimony, before allowing her to dwell on the origin of their attachment. ^[2][3]

They had been reading the romance of Lancelot together. As they read, their eyes repeatedly met; at the account of a kiss, Paolo kissed her. The book gave their desire an example and a language. Francesca’s recollection moves between the story on the page, the two readers’ glances and the moment when reading became action. Blake chooses the later encounter in Hell, but this remembered intimacy helps explain why the contact between his figures matters so much. Their hands and arms keep seeking a connection within a force that carries them away. ^[1][3]

Francesca speaks; Paolo weeps. This imbalance is essential to the canto’s emotional effect. Dante hears an eloquent account of love from one person while the other communicates through distress. His response grows from listening to both. At the end, compassion overwhelms him and he falls unconscious. Blake places that collapse on the ledge at the right, close to the upward sweep of the lovers. ^[1][3]

How Blake gives the wind a body

The whirlwind is more sharply organised than a cloud of scattered souls. Its pale boundaries turn it into a continuous channel, broad in the foreground, tightly coiled on the left, then extending upwards. Bodies follow the current in different orientations. Some seem stretched along its course; others bend across it or turn their faces towards a companion. The repeated curves make it difficult to settle on any one figure for long. Looking becomes an experience of being passed from body to body. ^[1]

The most conspicuous spiral contains an opening of dark blue. Around it, the figures are pressed into successive turns, so that a small patch of empty space becomes the centre of enormous activity. Along the lower edge, bodies appear larger and more individually legible. As the channel bends away, they become part of a compact moving mass. Blake varies both scale and density without giving the storm a naturalistic weather pattern. It has the coherence of a designed form and the discomfort of bodies that cannot choose their direction. ^[1]

The Italian critic Fortunato Bellonzi described the infernal storm’s shape as that of a gigantic serpent, connecting it with Blake’s preference for sinuous movement. That is a useful comparison of forms: the current coils and extends like a living thing. The visible figures remain the sufferers within it, however, and the image does not require a separately identified monster to explain its violence. The collective shape supplies the pressure. ^[1][15]

Dante offers several visual prompts for this invention. His storm sounds like a sea torn by opposing winds; the souls resemble flocks of starlings and long formations of cranes. These comparisons give Blake a moving multitude, changes of direction and a relationship between individual creatures and a larger pattern. He develops them into an enclosing spiral. The result can be read as an intensification of the poem’s imagery, even where its exact geometry belongs to the painter. ^[1][3]

Colour makes the current almost luminous against the surrounding blue. Pale bodies and yellowish washes are gathered inside emphatic contours, while warmer touches disturb the lower part of the scene. The eye can follow the outer boundaries quickly, then slow down to disentangle the smaller human gestures. The wind is at once a broad sweep across the sheet and an accumulation of particular struggles. Watercolour’s varying lightness gives the figures a fragile presence even when their outlines remain firm. ^[1]

The witness who falls

On the bank, Virgil’s long upright figure provides a pause in the motion. Beside him, Dante lies horizontally, his body extending along the ledge. The difference between their postures makes the pilgrim’s loss of consciousness clear without an elaborate facial expression. In Cary’s translation, Dante says that he fell “like a corpse”. Blake places this temporarily helpless living body beside a procession of the dead who cannot stop moving. ^[1][3]

The contrast makes pity physical. Dante has been able to ask questions, choose whom to address and follow a guide. Listening to Francesca removes that apparent security: his body gives way under an emotion he cannot master. The lovers’ punishment and the listener’s collapse are different events, but Blake gives them a common language of bodies subjected to forces beyond their control. This is a visual relationship within the composition, rather than a claim that Dante receives the same judgement as the condemned. ^[1][3]

Francesca’s testimony also complicates the spectator’s position. She repeatedly makes love the active power in her story, presenting the lovers as caught by something that brought them together and led them to death. The storm gives that account a striking visual equivalent: individual bodies are enclosed within an irresistible movement. Yet the canto has already named the moral judgement under which they suffer. Compassion and responsibility remain present together. Dante’s faint expresses the force of his response; it does not erase the setting in Hell. ^[1][3]

Blake makes us look from the bank towards the same suffering that has overwhelmed Dante. Virgil remains standing, but his companion offers no composed model of how to judge it. The fallen figure gives the image an emotional centre at the edge of its great spiral. We see the spectacle and the cost of witnessing it at the same time. ^[1]

The lovers in the sphere of light

The brilliant sphere above Virgil is the watercolour’s most suggestive departure from the canto. Tate identifies the figures within it as Paolo and Francesca appearing again, reunited in a glory of light. They are therefore represented both within the unfolding encounter and in a separate radiant image. The repeated pair introduces another way of seeing their relationship, apart from their exposure to the storm. ^[1][2]

Within the composition, the contrast is powerful. The large spiral encloses numerous bodies and a dark centre; the sphere gathers a pair within brightness. One form suggests repeated displacement, the other a concentration of intimacy. Their circular shapes answer one another across the sheet. What the whirlwind disperses into a crowd, the light allows us to recognise as a union between two people. This correspondence supports a hopeful reading of the image without requiring every upward movement in the picture to mean release. ^[1][2]

Dante does not describe the lovers escaping Hell. His account insists that the wind offers no relief, and Francesca tells her story within that condition. Consequently, the illuminated pair should be approached as Blake’s interpretive addition, not as a later event narrated in the poem. The glory may suggest that their bond can be imagined beyond the judgement imposed upon it. Tate’s language of reunion gives that possibility a firm place in the picture’s interpretation; the precise theological outcome remains unstated. ^[2][3]

Hayley Flynn’s study of the series stresses Blake’s attention to the poem’s environments and discusses David Fuller’s challenge to interpretations that overstate the artist’s departures from Dante. Here, much of the image follows the canto closely: the driven multitude, the inseparable pair and the fainting poet. The sphere becomes more compelling when seen against that substantial fidelity. Blake can understand the narrative and still open another imaginative possibility within it. ^[1][3][14]

A design carried into engraving

Blake selected this composition for one of the seven Dante engravings he worked on before his death. The related Circle of the Lustful: Paolo and Francesca preserves the essential relationships: the crowd within the storm, the prone Dante, the standing Virgil and the lovers in light. The subject could retain its emotional structure while moving into another medium. ^[2]

The comparison makes colour’s work in the Birmingham sheet especially clear. Its blue darkness and warmer pale washes distinguish the current, the bank and the radiance before the eye has traced every contour. In the engraving, these relationships have to be carried by line and differences of density. The two works offer different ways through the same scene: one through the meeting of washes and outlines, the other through the engraved network that constructs bodies and atmosphere. ^[1][2]

Flynn also proposes an earlier visual precedent: a woodcut in Alessandro Vellutello’s illustrated Dante, a version of which Blake owned, contains a swirl of naked figures in the circle of the adulterers. This possible source places the composition within an older history of visual responses to Dante. Blake’s particular distribution of darkness, bodies and light gives the Birmingham sheet its own character. ^[14]