The Pit of Disease, The Falsifiers

The two men at the lower right seem close enough to lean on one another. Yet each is occupied with his own skin. One folds forward, his head sinking towards his shoulder; the other lifts an arm over his head while drawing his opposite hand across his chest. Their proximity offers little comfort. Beneath them, a crowded row of heads brings more suffering faces almost to the edge of the picture. Far above, two robed travellers stand together on a shelf of rock, their hands raised towards their faces. William Blake makes the difference between sharing a place and sharing another person’s pain visible in the arrangement of bodies. ^[1]

The Pit of Disease: The Falsifiers brings together episodes from the twenty-ninth and thirtieth cantos of Dante’s Inferno. The travellers are Dante and his guide, Virgil. They have reached the last of the ten trenches within Hell’s eighth circle, where falsification is punished through disease. Blake gathers different afflictions into a wide landscape: scratching bodies at the right, a reclining group at the left, mountains between them and an extraordinary bridge whose stone contains human forms. ^[1][2]

The colour illustration follows the watercolour composition preserved in Tate’s N03362, dated 1824–27 and made in ink and watercolour on paper. Blake also translated the design into an engraving in 1826–27. Tate’s engraving A00010 is a later impression, catalogued as reprinted in 1892. Looking between these two documented works reveals how much could change while the principal figures kept their places. ^[1][3]

Scratching away the surface

Dante first approaches this trench through sound and smell. In Henry Francis Cary’s translation, the cries are so piercing that the traveller covers his ears. The accumulated illnesses resemble the contents of hospitals heaped into one ditch during the unhealthy heat of summer. Bodies lie across one another or struggle to crawl. The poem makes the approach an assault upon the senses before it allows any sufferer to give an account of himself. Blake’s open middle distance offers a startling setting for that bodily congestion. The sky and mountains have breadth; the people at the bottom have almost no room. ^[1][2]

The scratching pair gives the canto’s disorder a particularly memorable form. Dante compares the seated men to two metal pans propped together to hold heat. Their nails work faster than a groom’s hands currying a horse, stripping away flakes of encrusted skin. These domestic comparisons make an unfamiliar torment horribly imaginable. We know the closeness of utensils stacked together and the repeated action of scraping. In the watercolour, raised elbows and tightly bent torsos concentrate that restless action within a small area. ^[1][2]

Tate identifies the two men as Griffolino of Arezzo and Capocchio. Both belong to the poem’s company of alchemists, people whose falsification concerns materials. Griffolino explains that the reason for his execution on earth differs from the reason for his position in Hell. He had jokingly claimed that he could fly; when he failed to teach the trick, the credulous man he had deceived arranged his burning. Within Dante’s account, however, his alchemical practice brings him to this trench. The distinction separates human retaliation from the poem’s judgement, even in a story where both end in suffering. ^[1][2]

Capocchio closes the canto by claiming skill at imitating creative nature. His speech gives a remembered intelligence to a figure whom the eye first meets as diseased flesh. He can recognise Dante, join a conversation and make an ironic contribution to its attack on Sienese extravagance. Blake’s sharply visible scratching preserves the bodily introduction, while the poem restores the voice that follows it. Reading the episode changes the encounter: the afflicted men have particular histories and powers of recollection, even as pain commands their hands. ^[1][2]

At the opening of the next canto, Capocchio is seized by the neck and dragged away by Gianni Schicchi, a soul punished for impersonation. Blake’s seated pair therefore belongs to a moment before that violent interruption. The picture does not try to show every action in the two cantos. It combines selected encounters, allowing the alchemists to remain together while other figures evoke the different forms of falsification described farther on. ^[1][2]

The group beneath the bridge

The three figures reclining at the left are less securely identified. Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue proposes that they may be Master Adam of Brescia, Potiphar’s wife and Sinon. The scratching action strongly identifies the pair at the right, whereas the left group offers bodily shapes and proximity from which a correspondence with the poem can be proposed. Naming each head with equal confidence would make the image more definite than its evidence allows. ^[1]

Master Adam appears in canto XXX with a swollen body compared to a lute. His abdomen and wasted face have become grotesquely disproportionate. He explains that he counterfeited Florentine coins, adulterating their gold, and now suffers both accumulated fluid and desperate thirst. The contradiction is central to his punishment: his body contains moisture that brings him no relief. The full belly of Blake’s foremost reclining figure becomes especially emphatic in the engraving, where curved bands of shading give it a rounded, heavy volume. That resemblance supports the proposed identification without settling the names of the whole group. ^[1][2][3]

Dante gives Adam a second landscape inside the landscape of Hell. He continually remembers streams descending through the green Casentino countryside towards the Arno. The imagined water intensifies his thirst. His recollection makes deprivation active: an image of refreshment remains available to thought while its substance is unreachable. Blake’s distant mountain and the pale horizontal bands across the hollow give the eye somewhere to travel beyond the sufferers. Although these cannot be identified as Adam’s remembered streams, they help us feel the interval between an expansive world and a body unable to move through it. ^[1][2]

Adam’s wishes also turn towards revenge. He longs to find the men who induced him to falsify the money and would surrender the sight of a spring for the satisfaction of seeing one of them punished. His body can scarcely advance, yet his mind keeps pursuing another person. The poem gives that immobility a moral and emotional life. Blake’s group remains low against the ground, its limited movement set beneath the immense, upright mass of the bridge. ^[1][2]

The two feverish figures whom Adam identifies nearby are Potiphar’s wife, the false accuser of Joseph, and Sinon, whose deception helped bring the wooden horse into Troy. Heat rises from their bodies. Their offence belongs to false testimony, extending the trench’s subject from altered substances and counterfeit identity to lying speech. The picture’s conjunction of reclining and scratching sufferers can consequently suggest several kinds of damaged relationship: what people make, whom they pretend to be and what they persuade others to believe. Those distinctions come from the poem; the proposed identification of this particular trio remains Tate’s cautious reading. ^[1][2]

Looking from above

Dante and Virgil occupy a narrow projection high on the right. In the watercolour, Dante’s red robe and Virgil’s blue-grey one fall in long, nearly uninterrupted folds. Their upright silhouettes contrast with the folded limbs below. Both bring cloth or hands towards the lower face, an action that can recall the canto’s intolerable atmosphere. The men’s closeness is also different from the alchemists’ proximity. They share a direction of attention, looking down into the valley from the same precarious support. ^[1][2]

Their height does not put them outside the picture’s pressure. A dark shelf hangs overhead, its jagged underside sending pointed forms towards the open sky. The rock beneath their feet narrows before descending towards the afflicted bodies. To follow the outline downwards is to discover how closely the witnesses and sufferers belong to the same construction. Blake gives the poets a vantage point, then makes its material connection with the pit impossible to overlook. ^[1]

Looking becomes an explicit problem at the end of canto XXX. Adam and Sinon exchange blows, then accusations, each finding fresh language for the other’s disgrace. Dante listens too eagerly. Virgil rebukes him, and the traveller turns in shame before receiving reassurance. The canto asks a reader to distinguish attention that recognises suffering from the pleasure of lingering over a quarrel. Blake does not depict the brawl itself, but the watching poets keep the act of witnessing within view. Their presence invites us to consider how we are looking at the bodies below. ^[1][2]

Human forms inside the stone

The bridge at the left supplies another kind of bodily confinement. Across its pier, heads, arms and bent backs seem caught within the rock. Some shapes are immediately recognisable; others emerge only after the eye has begun following a contour that first appeared to describe stone. The lower sufferers remain separate figures lying beside the structure. Higher up, the distinction between a person and the place that contains that person becomes difficult to maintain. ^[1]

Butlin interprets these petrified figures as humanity at its greatest distance from divine energy. The Tate catalogue relates them to similar constructions elsewhere in Blake’s Dante designs. This is a reading of Blake’s recurring imagery, rather than an anatomical detail supplied by these verses of Dante. The poem gives us bridges, rocks and bodies crowded into a trench; Blake allows the bridge itself to acquire the burden of bodies. The transformation makes the setting participate in the condition of its inhabitants. ^[1][2]

The engraving makes these human shapes particularly insistent. Near the top of the left pier, a figure bends forward with a head lowered towards the knees. Farther down, folded arms and draped limbs form bands across the support. Their repeated curves establish a vertical counterpart to the row of faces across the lower right. People occupy the scene’s opposing edges in different states: some scratch, some lie helplessly, some seem absorbed into the architecture. The large empty opening between them becomes an interval shaped by confinement. ^[1][3]

The watercolour’s two reds

Colour draws connections across that interval. A dark blue-grey mass presses over the upper left, while red washes flare beneath it and cross the slopes beyond the foreground. Their uneven strength lets the paper remain luminous in places. The mountains appear both solidly outlined and thinly washed, with passages of green, grey and red moving across them. Against these broad areas, the injured flesh of the scratching pair is concentrated and close. ^[1]

Tate’s August 2004 technical caption identifies two different reds in the flames: a red lake, probably brazilwood, and gritty vermilion. It also identifies vermilion in parts of the two scratching figures’ raw bodies. This is the museum’s material account; the pigments cannot be securely named by inspecting a reproduction alone. The caption explains that their different working properties made them difficult to handle in thin washes with a gum medium. What looks like a related family of reds therefore involves materially distinct choices. ^[1]

That information sharpens the experience of looking. Red passes from the atmosphere of Hell to injured skin, linking the setting’s heat to the body’s surface. Yet the thinness of a distant wash and the more emphatic bodily marks keep those passages distinct. Blake can let colour travel across the whole composition while asking us to recognise where it touches a particular shoulder, chest or arm. The landscape’s scale never entirely absorbs the small, repeated actions in the foreground. ^[1]

What changes in the engraving

The engraved composition preserves the broad orientation of the watercolour: human bridge at the left, witnesses above the right and alchemists below them. Colour gives way to a remarkably varied system of lines. Close horizontal strokes pack the dark upper field; longer, bending strokes define flame-like currents underneath it. Across the mountain, lines follow the slope in closely spaced courses. The same medium distinguishes the heavy ceiling, the turning terrain and the unstable forms of fire by changing direction, density and rhythm. ^[1][3]

The foreground becomes more densely articulated. A mesh of crossing lines runs across one seated figure’s lower body, while small angular divisions cover parts of the other. Individual faces underneath them acquire clear outlines, different hair and separate angles of repose. At the left, shading expands around the round abdomen of the foremost reclining figure. The engraving repeatedly turns a broadly washed or lightly indicated passage into an area the eye can examine stroke by stroke. ^[1][3]

The difference is especially striking in the bridge. Watercolour permits its human forms to hover between bodies and cracked stone, with subdued washes running across both. In the print, folds, hands and bowed heads become more firmly distinguished by repeated marks. Their visibility gives Butlin’s interpretation a stronger visual foothold, although greater clarity does not by itself prove one exclusive meaning. Blake has made the comparison between inert architecture and arrested human action harder to avoid. ^[1][3]

Robert N. Essick’s study of the Dante engravings identifies their technique as drypoint combined with engraving, without etching: preliminary scratched indications could be developed with the graver. He also locates a working proof of The Falsifiers in the British Museum, 1929,0713.276, in which some lower-left figures remain incomplete and several areas lack later shading. The familiar engraved image developed through decisions tested on paper. ^[4]

The early proof is particularly revealing for the uncertain left group. Essick records that two of the three figures were then only scratched in outline. Further work strengthened figures that now carry part of the connection with canto XXX. This elaboration gave human presences weight and legibility, alongside the accumulating darkness of the sky, while leaving their precise literary identities open. ^[4]

Drawings, copper and later paper

Blake’s letters place drawing and engraving together within the continuing Dante undertaking. Planning a visit to John Linnell in July 1826, he intended to bring his book of drawings and one plate enclosed inside it. He postponed travelling because of cold weather and weakness. The letter does not identify that plate as The Falsifiers, but it brings the larger process into an intimate scale: a book, a piece of copper and an artist arranging how to carry his work. ^[15]

On 25 April 1827 he reported having proved six plates and prepared the fighting devils for copper. His attachment to Dante remained intense, while the engravings were still being developed. The Falsifiers became the sixth subject in the seven-plate suite. When the prints were issued in 1838, after Blake’s death, their cover label identified this design through Cary’s description of the two men propped against one another. The later presentation returned the reader to the scratching pair even though the image gathered material from two cantos. ^[3][16]

A particular printed sheet still has its own history. Tate dates A00010’s impression to the 1892 reprinting, separating that event from Blake’s work on the plate in 1826–27. Essick shows why assigning nineteenth-century impressions can require paper, provenance and close physical comparison; a small image cannot supply all that evidence. Tate’s documented printing date therefore belongs to its own impression. The broader history belongs with Blake’s prints. ^[3][4]

Returning to the colour image brings back the delicate relation between open space and crowded flesh. The poem supplies voices that can speak across the distance; the image holds the witnesses above bodies that remain painfully close to us. Within the larger Dante series, this valley makes stillness as unsettling as movement. Scratching continues, thirst persists, and the bridge appears to have acquired a human weight that it can never put down. ^[1][2]