Plutus

One hand reaches up into the pale space above; the other stretches across a sack at the opposite edge of the sheet. Between them sits an enormous figure, his legs folded across the foreground and his mouth open beneath a deeply furrowed brow. Behind him, two slender, robed travellers stand on higher ground. William Blake’s Plutus makes the guardian of wealth physically overwhelming, then places the people he would obstruct beyond his sprawling body. The money-sack gives his agitation an object: whatever happens to his authority, he maintains contact with his possession. ^[1]

Tate dates the drawing 1824–7 and records graphite, ink and watercolour on paper, with a support measuring 527 × 371 mm. It belongs to Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The episode occupies a transition between cantos: the travellers meet Plutus at the end of Inferno VI, and their confrontation begins the seventh. Blake gives this brief encounter nearly the whole upright sheet. ^[1][2]

At the edge of the fourth circle

Dante and Virgil have just crossed the circle of the gluttons. In the sixth canto, cold rain, hail and filthy water fall on exposed souls, while the three-headed Cerberus barks above them. Virgil quiets that guardian by throwing earth into his mouths, an episode Blake explores in Cerberus. The travellers then speak with Ciacco, whose account of Florence’s conflicts names avarice among the forces setting its people against one another. Wealth enters the conversation before its guardian enters the scene. ^[2]

After Ciacco sinks back among the sufferers, Dante asks about the resurrection and the future intensity of their pain. The pair continue along their curving path until they reach the steps leading down. There they find Plutus. The canto closes with his arrival, leaving the next canto to begin with the sound of his voice. This placement makes him a threshold figure, encountered when one region of punishment gives way to another. ^[2]

The fourth circle contains both those who hoarded wealth and those who squandered it. They push heavy weights with their chests, meet in collisions, exchange accusations and turn back to repeat the movement. Their opposed habits have produced a common futility. Dante includes popes and cardinals among those ruled by avarice; the poem’s criticism reaches into the institutions of his own Christian world. Plutus guards a region of misused wealth with several kinds of inhabitants. ^[2]

Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue identifies the painted figure as the god of wealth and observes that Dante blurred Plutus with Pluto, god of the underworld. The similar names can be confusing, but the money-sack gives Blake’s subject a clear emphasis. His guardian belongs at the entrance to a circle organised around the destructive handling of riches. The figure’s infernal setting and his possession work together, without requiring us to treat the two classical deities as interchangeable. ^[1]

A cry that defeats translation

Plutus opens the seventh canto with the strange words “Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe!” Their meaning has attracted competing explanations for centuries. Robert Hollander’s Princeton commentary describes the continuing disagreement over their language, intelligibility and purpose. They may be an invocation, an oath or an expression of astonishment, but a confident English translation would conceal the uncertainty. Henry Francis Cary, whose translation gives one useful route through the canto, renders the opening as a cry to Satan; that is his interpretive choice. ^[2][13]

The dramatic effect is clearer than the wording. Dante is afraid, and Virgil reassures him that the creature cannot prevent their descent. He then commands Plutus to be silent, calls him a cursed wolf and tells him to consume himself inwardly with his rage. The journey has been willed on high. Virgil invokes the heavenly victory over rebellious pride to establish an authority beyond the guardian’s power. ^[2]

Dante describes the result through a nautical comparison. Sails swollen by wind fall when their mast breaks; so Plutus falls to the ground. The image gives sudden bodily collapse the quality of lost inflation. A terrifying presence can be emptied of the power that seemed to fill it. Blake’s low, spread figure can be considered beside this comparison, though the picture does not provide a precise sequence of the movement. The mouth remains open and one arm still rises: the encounter’s noise and the body’s fall coexist in the image. ^[1][2]

The catalogue locates the subject in the closing three lines of canto VI and the opening twelve of VII. Looking a few lines further, to Dante’s falling sails, helps explain the drawing’s contrast between great size and insecure command. Blake does not need to show a mast or a ship. The guardian’s body occupies much of the foreground, yet the travellers stand above him with ample space around their heads. His bulk has failed to organise the entire world of the picture. ^[1][2]

The spread body and the standing travellers

Plutus’s crossed legs make a broad base at the foot of the sheet. One knee swells towards the left, while the other bent leg carries the eye across the lower right. The feet overlap near the bottom. Heavy contours and dark shadows give these limbs a density absent from the long robes behind them. His anatomy repeatedly turns across itself, concentrating the creature’s strength in a cramped, awkward position. ^[1]

Above that compact base, the arms pull in opposite directions. The raised hand at the right spreads its long fingers against an open, lightly washed area. Across the left, the other arm extends almost horizontally to the sack. That difference matters. The upward gesture broadcasts alarm or resistance, while the outward hand stays attached to something close and particular. Even at the height of his outcry, possession remains part of his posture. ^[1]

Blake gives the face a conspicuous framework of pointed projections, sweeping hair and strongly marked folds. The eyes turn upward; the open mouth exposes teeth. Its dark outline draws attention within a drawing whose background often remains pale and provisional. These visible distortions make the guardian strange and agitated. They also require critical attention because the museum has identified a history of prejudice within the figure’s treatment. ^[1]

The two travellers offer a different kind of bodily organisation. Their long garments fall towards the ledge, and their feet rest close together. One stands comparatively upright; the nearer figure inclines his head and extends a hand. The upright figure’s arm reaches towards his companion, maintaining their relationship as a pair. Their smaller scale records distance, but their linked presence gives them a composure that the foreground guardian lacks. ^[1]

Blue-grey washes pass through the surrounding space and across the travellers’ robes. A broad, darker band beneath their feet separates their ledge from the creature below. Thin flame-like shapes rise in the interval, with warmer touches near the lower sides. The picture combines a solidly modelled torso with areas where graphite remains exposed. Our attention shifts between the emphatic body and the lightly established passage behind it. ^[1]

What the money-sack adds

At the lower left, the sack is much less forcefully drawn than Plutus’s arm. It could easily be overlooked beside his face and extended limbs. Butlin records a pencil inscription on it: “Money”. The word makes the object’s significance explicit. It is a small piece of writing with a large interpretive effect, identifying the possession over which the hand spreads. ^[1]

The sack also brings an earlier Blake text unusually close to this image. In his letter to the Reverend John Trusler of 23 August 1799, Blake contrasts the miser’s vision with imaginative perception. For the miser, a guinea appears more beautiful than the sun; a bag worn through the use of money has finer proportions than a vine full of grapes. The comparison concerns what people are capable of seeing and valuing. Desire can reorganise beauty around an object that serves its own fixation. ^[14]

That letter does not mention the later Dante drawing, and it cannot establish a direct programme for it. It does, however, offer Blake’s own explanation of how a money-bag can become more than an accessory. The miser’s preference diminishes the world around him. Sunlight and living growth lose their claims on his attention when measured against accumulated wealth. In Plutus, the outstretched hand and labelled sack give this narrowing of attachment a bodily form. ^[1][14]

There is a useful practical complication within the same letter. Blake also names the price of his engraving work, explains differences in labour and says that he is content to earn his living through painting or engraving. His criticism of possessiveness exists alongside a working artist’s need to charge for skilled production. That combination discourages an account in which every payment is automatically treated as an artistic betrayal. The issue is the authority given to money over perception, work and human ends. ^[14]

Art under the rule of money

Butlin, following Milton Klonsky, connects Plutus with Blake’s attack on money in the inscriptions to The Laocoön. One of those inscriptions declares: “Where any view of Money exists Art cannot be carried on, but War only”. The assertion is severe, and its surrounding text gives it a wider religious and political setting. Blake places money alongside empire, accusation and the destruction of imaginative art. ^[1][15]

Elsewhere in the same inscription sequence, artistic practice becomes prayer and praise. Blake presents the Old and New Testaments as a great code of art, connects Christian life with making, and insists on continuing practice. He also calls money the lifeblood of poor families while rejecting charity dependent on the powers of Caesar or empire. These statements join the conditions of artistic freedom to questions of authority and dependence. The poor person’s material need remains within the argument. ^[15]

Read beside this text, the guardian’s size acquires another possible force. Wealth has become something capable of occupying a whole approach, claiming space out of proportion to the small object that identifies it. The sack itself is slight; the body organised around its possession is immense. The visual imbalance allows Blake’s written criticism to sharpen our sense of what this immense body represents. ^[1][14][15]

Dante’s canto develops a different account of wealth’s distribution. Virgil explains Fortune as a divinely appointed minister who moves worldly advantages between peoples and families beyond human control. She continues her work despite human complaint. Later, the travellers reach the muddy Styx and the punishment of anger. Neither Fortune nor the crowds pushing weights appear in this drawing. Those passages enlarge the episode’s context while showing how selectively Blake has concentrated on the encounter at its entrance. ^[2]

Reading the historical prejudice

Tate’s March 2011 label offers a further, uncomfortable interpretation. It relates Blake’s treatment of the figure to antisemitic caricatures circulating in the eighteenth century, in which Jewish people were falsely associated with an unscrupulous appetite for wealth. The label places that visual tradition beside Johann Caspar Lavater’s physiognomy, a system that claimed to read character through bodily features. Its discussion identifies antisemitism within Lavater’s religious thinking, including the claim that conversion to Christianity could change Jewish appearance. These are historical prejudices, not reliable accounts of bodies, belief or character. ^[1]

This context changes the questions we should bring to the face. A distortion intended to signal greed may draw on a visual convention that directs hostility towards an actual community. Criticising avarice does not make that convention harmless. The museum’s interpretation asks us to consider how the figure’s force could depend partly on a dehumanising association already available to viewers. We can examine that possibility without repeating the association as a truth about Jewish people. ^[1]

The label also has limits. It offers an interpretation of the image within a historical visual and intellectual framework; it does not furnish a statement by Blake identifying this creature as Jewish or documenting exactly which passage of Lavater determined its features. No ethnicity can be inferred from the drawing’s nose, mouth or head. Keeping the attribution clear allows the prejudicial tradition to be discussed while avoiding an invented account of the artist’s private intentions. ^[1]

The tension should remain visible. Blake’s writings can attack the power of money and celebrate Hebrew scripture while this image can still be read as employing an antisemitic stereotype. One strand does not erase the other. The drawing rewards close attention both to its imaginative economy and to the inherited conventions through which it makes a threatening body legible. ^[1][15]

Marks on a surviving sheet

The pencil word on the sack belongs to the composition, but another recorded inscription is on the back. Butlin notes the number 93, written with the sheet turned upside down. It is not a number floating in the infernal scene and supplies no explanation of the guardian’s action. The catalogue also records a watermark consisting of the letters “WE”. Those letters alone do not establish the year in which Blake drew or coloured the work. ^[1]

Tate acquired the sheet in 1919 through the Art Fund, with assistance from a special National Gallery grant and donors including Lord Duveen. The present collection record brings its physical particulars together with different generations of interpretation: Butlin’s catalogue explains the Dante passage and the connection to The Laocoön, while the later label confronts the figure’s historical stereotyping. Each helps us see something that the immediate spectacle of the body might obscure. ^[1]

Within the wider Dante series, Plutus concentrates an entire problem of passage into the relation between three bodies and a sack. The great guardian sprawls and protests. His hand stays with money, while the smaller travellers have a journey to continue. Dante’s poem supplies the authority that defeats him; Blake’s drawing makes us feel how much space his defeated claim can still occupy. ^[1][2]