The Punishment of the Thieves

A body arches until its hanging head almost meets the sweep of its own arm. Another lies across the foreground, partly outside the picture. Between them, pale serpents rise in curves touched with blue and orange. William Blake’s The Punishment of the Thieves brings human and reptilian forms into such close contact that following a single outline becomes a difficult, absorbing task. The bodies have weight and muscular definition, yet their arrangement unsettles the separateness that those solid contours seem to promise. ^[1]

Tate dates the drawing to 1824–7 and records chalk, ink and watercolour on paper. Its catalogue identifies the subject, with strong probability, as a general view of the thieves’ pit in Dante’s Inferno. No single named incident is securely represented. That distinction gives us a useful way into the picture: begin with the crowded bodies and their serpents, then consider the different kinds of bodily loss Dante describes. ^[1][2]

Bodies pressed against the picture

Blake fills the sheet almost edge to edge. At the left, a broad torso turns beneath a head thrown back towards another face near the margin. Near the centre, powerful legs support the figure whose upper body arches across the top of the composition. A head appears beyond the curve, behind which long strands of hair descend. The horizontal body below blocks much of the foreground. Five human faces can be distinguished, but tracing each back to a complete figure takes longer than counting them. ^[1]

The difficulty comes partly from overlap. A shoulder disappears behind another mass of flesh; a leg reaches towards an intervening head; the bent figure’s arm and hair form another enclosure at the right. Figures seem to occupy spaces left inside the poses of their neighbours. Their proximity gives the group a heavy, compressed rhythm. There is little open ground through which a viewer might imagine walking between them. ^[1]

The serpents introduce a different kind of movement. One long curve stretches across the lower left, while another rises and dips over the foreground body. A further reptilian head appears against the bent figure at the right. Their pale colouring connects them with the surrounding flesh, but blue markings and touches of orange help the eye follow their routes. Broad human backs and thighs remain comparatively massive; the snakes travel through the composition in narrower, more agile curves. ^[1]

Their heads are oddly conspicuous. Rounded eyes and small, open mouths give them an almost masklike presence. They can be found before their whole lengths have been disentangled from the surrounding bodies. That reverses the problem posed by the human figures: faces announce individual presences, while the routes connecting those presences to limbs and torsos keep slipping from certainty. ^[1]

Grey modelling gives the flesh a sculptural density, although the paper remains visible through areas of pale wash. At the right, thin horizontal strokes open a little space behind the group. Elsewhere, blue-grey colour and lightly indicated forms offer few firm landmarks. Blake gives the bodies enormous emphasis while withholding the clear setting that might establish their distances from one another. The pit is experienced through compression and entanglement. ^[1]

How Dante reaches the pit

Dante’s encounter begins with a strenuous approach. In Inferno XXIV, Virgil helps him climb the broken rock left by a ruined bridge. The guide studies each foothold and urges his exhausted companion to continue. Dante then hears an angry voice from the next trench, but darkness prevents him from seeing clearly. He asks to descend because hearing without understanding and looking without discerning have become intolerable. The punishment must be brought within reach of sight before it can be described. ^[2]

The contrast with Blake’s drawing is striking. Dante needs to get closer; Blake places us so close that bodies occupy nearly the whole field. The familiar pair of clothed travellers supplies no conspicuous viewing station in this composition. We are confronted by the group itself, without a clearly separated figure showing us how to react. Looking becomes an encounter with obstructed bodily outlines. ^[1][2]

The thieves inhabit the seventh trench of the eighth circle, within the region called Malebolge. Once the chasm opens to Dante’s view, he sees a multitude of snakes and naked spirits running in fear. There is nowhere to hide. Snakes bind the spirits’ hands behind their backs and wind around their bodies. The serpent becomes both an attacker and a restraint, preventing the movement that might allow escape. ^[2]

Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue connects Blake’s sheet particularly with Inferno XXIV, lines 77–95, the passage introducing that general condition. The identification is carefully phrased because the drawing does not provide the unmistakable details of one later transformation. Calling its foreground figure Vanni Fucci or Buoso would give the image a precision that the catalogue does not claim. Its concentration on a group allows the shared predicament of the pit to occupy the entire sheet. ^[1]

Dante’s running spirits and Blake’s densely posed bodies also create different rhythms. The poem describes frightened motion through a swarm of reptiles. Blake allows reclining, seated and dramatically bent figures to coexist within one crowded view. Some poses might briefly suggest rest, yet the serpents and unresolved contacts prevent that impression from becoming reassurance. The bodies are exposed even where they appear still. ^[1][2]

Three ways of losing a human shape

Across cantos XXIV and XXV, Dante develops several distinct punishments. The first named sufferer, Vanni Fucci, is bitten where neck and shoulders meet. He burns, collapses into ashes and immediately takes his former shape again. The comparison with the phoenix makes the sequence one of renewed existence, but renewal offers no release. He returns bewildered to the place of punishment. ^[2]

Fucci then speaks. He identifies himself, confesses to stealing sacred ornaments and explains that another person was falsely blamed. He also turns his knowledge of coming political conflict into a means of wounding Dante. At the beginning of the next canto, his defiance culminates in an insulting gesture towards God, after which serpents silence and bind him. His restored body carries a voice and an antagonistic personality; bodily destruction has failed to end either his consciousness or his hostility. ^[2]

A different encounter joins two beings into one. A six-footed serpent fastens upon a spirit whom Cary’s translation calls Agnello. Feet, arms, cheeks and thighs become points of attachment. The bodies merge like heated wax until their original forms can no longer be separately recovered. Here the punishment is fusion: a new creature advances, carrying the loss of both its earlier shapes. ^[2]

The later encounter involving Buoso works through exchange. A serpent bites a man; smoke rises; human and reptile take on one another’s forms. A tail divides as legs close together. Features alter, and the power of speech moves from one body to the other. Dante pauses to compare his description with the metamorphoses of Lucan and Ovid, insisting on the extraordinary difficulty of representing two natures exchanging their substances before his eyes. ^[2]

These differences matter when looking at Blake’s general pit. Reformation after burning, fusion and reciprocal transformation all threaten bodily stability, but they do so in different ways. The Tate drawing need not illustrate all three simultaneously to belong to their imaginative world. Its overlapping flesh and serpents make the boundary of a person difficult to follow, while Dante’s narrative explains how radically that boundary can be violated. ^[1][2]

The more specific Serpent Attacking Buoso Donati offers another entry into this part of the poem. That design belongs to the exchange episode. The wider sequence of Blake’s illustrations to Dante places both works within a journey through different forms of punishment, guidance and changed perception. Here, the general view holds our attention on the bodies crowded together before any single name supplies a narrative centre. ^[1][2]

Another view of thieves and serpents

A separate watercolour in the National Gallery of Victoria makes a revealing comparison. The Thieves and Serpents, accession 1004-3, is catalogued as Butlin 812.47 and associated with Inferno XXIV, lines 82–96. The museum records pen and ink and watercolour over pencil and black chalk, with sponging, on a sheet measuring 37.2 × 52.8 cm. Tate’s catalogue describes this Melbourne work as another general impression of the pit. ^[14][1]

The Melbourne composition gives the figures more room. Tall flames rise behind standing bodies, while others sit or lie near the ground. A central figure turns towards a neighbour; at the right, an extended leg carries another body into a striding pose. Small clothed travellers can be seen high on the right, set apart from the much larger sufferers below. The height difference establishes a position from which the pit can be observed. ^[14]

Tate’s drawing suppresses much of that distance. Its large arching figure occupies the upper space that the Melbourne sheet gives to flames and the remote witnesses. The foreground body brings flesh towards the edge, and overlapping contours replace the more legible intervals between figures. Moving between the two works shows Blake varying the conditions of looking at the same region: a broader spectacle in one, close bodily pressure in the other. ^[1][14]

Gender and the history of interpretation

The figures have prompted sharply different accounts of what their bodies mean. In the catalogue published in 1990, Butlin reports Albert S. Roe’s interpretation of the scene as an allegory of Woman after the Fall. Roe connected the serpents with materialism and imagined a reversal in which Woman becomes the victim of the power she had used to dominate Man. Butlin explicitly challenges the assumption underlying that reading: that all the pictured figures are female. Roe’s allegory is a historical interpretation, with a disputed visual premise. ^[1]

Tate’s March 2011 display caption takes a different approach. It calls the figures female and proposes that their muscularity creates gender ambiguity that might have suggested moral degeneration to a nineteenth-century audience. It also describes the central pose as a distortion of classical grace and reads the snakes as emerging from the figures’ genitals. These are interpretive claims made by a particular museum text, including a proposed reconstruction of an audience’s response. They do not settle the figures’ anatomy or turn gender ambiguity into evidence of a moral condition. ^[15]

The disagreement cannot be resolved by combining the two accounts into a single confident description. The later caption’s use of female bodies repeats a premise that the earlier catalogue had challenged, although the interpretations built upon it differ. A reader should be able to see that difference. Muscularity, exposed flesh, unusual poses and serpentine contact are visible; assigning every figure a sex and then making that assignment explain the picture’s morality requires further argument. ^[1][15]

Butlin also summarises David Fuller’s interpretation of sexual violence in Blake’s thieves designs as an assault on the victims’ identities. That argument connects bodily invasion with the poem’s transformations. It directs attention towards the threatened integrity of a person, while Roe’s account organises the picture around an allegory of Woman and materialism. Neither should be passed off as a literal inventory of what the sheet depicts. Fuller’s position here reaches us through Butlin’s discussion. ^[1]

The picture remains disturbing without making its bodies carry a modern diagnosis or a condemnation of gender variation. Its bent backs, hanging heads and enclosed spaces make exposure and loss of control tangible. Looking carefully also preserves differences between the figures: one face tilts upwards, another hangs down, and the head near the bottom seems almost trapped between surrounding masses. The group is crowded, but its suffering is encountered through particular positions. ^[1]

Heroic bodies and borrowed poses

Butlin describes the figures as strongly Michelangelesque. He also records C. H. Collins Baker’s proposal that the central leaning figure derives from an engraving after Michelangelo’s Last Judgement. This is a suggested route through an earlier reproduction, rather than proof that Blake copied directly from the fresco. The distinction leaves room for the obvious formal interest of the comparison: an imposing body can possess the scale and muscular authority of heroic art while being bent into an acutely vulnerable position. ^[1]

Martin Myrone offers a further art-historical approach in his essay William Blake’s Sodomites. Discussing the Dante watercolours more broadly, he connects their shifting forms with visible pencil contours, transparent colour and compressed space. His account encourages us to consider how Blake draws instability, alongside questions about what a figure might symbolise. That approach is particularly useful here, where solidly modelled flesh and difficult overlaps coexist on the same surface. ^[16]

Myrone illustrates Henry Fuseli’s Punishment of the Thieves of 1772. In that drawing, clothed witnesses stand at the left while intertwined bodies and snakes fill the right. He places the potentially erotic charge of such heroic suffering within a visual tradition associated with Fuseli and his circle, complicating an explanation drawn wholly from Dante’s words. This comparison supplies a context for Blake’s expressive bodies, without establishing that this particular Tate drawing copies Fuseli’s composition. ^[16]

In Blake’s sheet, the central arch holds that tension especially clearly. Its powerful legs appear capable of support, yet the torso turns them into the base of a precarious span. The head hangs at the far end of that span, and the serpentine curve nearby makes it harder to perceive the body as a closed unit. Muscular power offers no obvious protection from the surrounding entanglement. ^[1]

Marks, titles and the surviving sheet

The Tate sheet measures 372 × 527 mm. Butlin records a pencil inscription identifying Hell at the upper right, running vertically, and further pencil notations on the reverse. He also records a WE watermark. The place-name helps anchor the drawing within Dante’s infernal world, but the marks do not identify an individual thief. Nor does the catalogue designation 812.102 establish that this was the 102nd drawing Blake completed. ^[1]

Its title has changed as the subject has been identified. In exhibitions held at Tate, Manchester, Nottingham and Edinburgh in 1913–14, it appeared as an unidentified subject of a Dantesque character. The later identification with the thieves’ pit gives the composition a strong literary setting while retaining the qualification that no exact incident is depicted. Tate acquired the work in 1919 with assistance from a special grant and donations, presented through the National Art-Collections Fund. ^[1]

Returning from those records to the image, the foreground serpent provides a useful route for the eye. Its blue-edged body travels across pale paper and heavy flesh, then rises into a small, insistent head. Following it brings us back to the drawing’s central experience: a line can be traced, a face can be found, yet the person to whom a body belongs remains difficult to hold apart from everything around it. ^[1]