Satan Calling his Legions

Satan stands above a cavern of crowded bodies, his arms spread against a pale eruption of flame. His feet occupy a narrow summit. Below him, a crowned figure leans on an elbow, while others crouch, float, bend or clutch their knees. The leader has room to extend himself; almost everyone beneath him seems pressed into a smaller space. William Blake makes the act of calling visible through that difference between an open body and an enclosed multitude.

The painting at Petworth, catalogued as Satan calling up his Legions, dates from about 1800–05 and is made in tempera and gold leaf on canvas. Its dark reds and golds bring the figures into the same burning environment, while their varied positions give the eye separate encounters within it. The National Trust holds the work as NT 486264. ^[1]

The subject comes from the opening of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Satan and the angels who followed his rebellion have been expelled from Heaven. He attempts to recover their courage, restore their military order and turn catastrophe into another occasion for action. Blake gathers that summons into a picture whose lower corners remain full of suffering. The voice promises movement; the bodies make us consider what answering it would mean. ^[2]

Standing above the flames

The first thing to follow is the line of Satan’s stance. His legs rise almost uninterrupted from the dark rock, and his torso reaches towards the two raised hands. Behind him, the pale vertical strokes widen into a fan. This surrounding light makes his upper body conspicuous even within a surface so crowded with lines, reds and brown shadows. His arms appear to open the space in which he stands.

Elsewhere, movement becomes more difficult to disentangle. At the upper left, a figure stretches along a diagonal; at the right, a body bends within a great sweep of flame. Lower down, backs, shoulders and folded limbs make a chain of interrupted curves. The eye can travel around Satan in a restless circuit, but his upright position repeatedly draws it back. His upright position gives direction to the surrounding movement.

Blake gives this bodily order a strikingly narrow foundation. Satan’s feet are planted on a ledge above a much larger, hollowed mass. The rock shelters the reclining crowned figure and separates the summit from the lower groups. Height supplies authority, yet the picture offers little sense of a stable platform on which the whole company could assemble. From below, the solitary summit looks difficult to reach.

Milton likewise distinguishes impressive stature from secure power. When Satan rises from the lake, the flames bend away from him. Later he towers over the gathered host, retaining something of his former splendour. But the narrator has already explained that he could rise only through Heaven’s permission. Satan and Beelzebub celebrate an escape they attribute to their own strength, while the poem gives the reader another explanation. The magnificence of the standing figure belongs within that tension. ^[2]

A voice that brings the army back

The summons begins with an appeal to rank. Satan addresses the fallen angels by the dignities they held in Heaven and then shames them for remaining prostrate. He makes their pain sound like voluntary idleness. Resting after battle, he suggests, is an absurd choice when their conqueror may still attack. The speech works through pride, fear and remembered comradeship before arriving at its famous command. ^[2]

“Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen!” ^[2]

Milton immediately follows this with an uncomfortable comparison. The angels respond like men discovered asleep on watch, rousing themselves before they are fully awake. Their obedience is rapid, but their suffering continues. The force of the command does not depend on having relieved the condition of those who hear it. In Blake’s painting, the contrast between the upper gesture and the contracted bodies below allows us to feel a similar separation between command and recovery. ^[2]

The lower left is particularly arresting. A figure draws the knees close and holds the body within a tight outline. Nearby, other heads and shoulders occupy small pockets of space. These bodies remain legible as individual burdens, even though the title asks us to imagine an army beyond counting.

The poem eventually gives the multitude banners, instruments and ordered ranks. Music steadies their steps across the burnt ground; renewed formation produces a display that again enlarges Satan’s pride. Blake’s tempera keeps our attention on the uneven bodily conditions from which such order would have to emerge. Some forms already seem airborne, while others remain heavily seated or bent towards the earth. The picture lets several stages of response coexist. ^[2]

There is also more feeling in Milton’s leader than a simple emblem of defiance would suggest. Before another address to the assembled host, Satan repeatedly attempts to speak and weeps. The narrator describes his awareness of the followers whose glory has withered through his revolt. The poem makes grandeur, responsibility, cruelty and grief occupy the same character. Blake’s splendid anatomy cannot by itself settle whether the painter endorses Satan’s cause; it draws attention to the power with which that cause can be presented. ^[2]

The figures beneath him

The crowned man below the summit occupies the next most prominent place. His body extends sideways across a shelf, and his bent arm brings a hand towards his head. This leaning posture slows the ascent towards Satan. We pass from lower bodies compressed into the foreground, through a figure who seems capable of occupying his ledge at length, to the commanding vertical above.

The National Trust’s account, adapted from the Sussex exhibition catalogue edited by Andrew Loukes, identifies him as Beelzebub. It also proposes Mammon for a bent figure at the lower right and Dagon for the scaly figure in the foreground. The latter two identifications remain possibilities. ^[1]

These suggestions lead to different parts of Milton’s narrative. Beelzebub is Satan’s closest companion early in Book I, helping him plan the recovery of the host. The account of his rank immediately below Satan comes during the council in Book II, where his appearance still commands an audience. Blake’s placement can bring this continuing hierarchy into the earlier scene without illustrating a single instant of the poem literally. ^[2]

Dagon appears in Book I’s account of the names the fallen spirits will later acquire among humanity. Milton describes a being human above and fish below, linking him to the shattered idol in his temple. Looking at the scaly thighs in Blake’s lower group makes the proposed connection intelligible. Yet the figure’s immediate action also matters: his arms extend around two bent companions. Before naming him, we see a body joining other bodies within an enclosed, uneasy cluster. ^[2]

Mammon belongs to the mining episode near the end of Book I. Even in Heaven his attention had been directed downwards, towards the gold underfoot. In Hell he leads the excavation of a fiery hill, and the extracted metal becomes the material for the infernal capital. A bent posture can therefore carry a particular association with misdirected attention. It cannot identify every downward-looking figure as Mammon. ^[2]

These possible identities send us back to individual passages, yet the repeated gestures of bending, clutching and supporting give the figures relationships that survive uncertainty about their names. We can attend to the pressure of one body against another while leaving a proposed identification open.

Gold in a world of darkness

Milton’s Hell contains a disturbing abundance of precious material. Gold emerges from the wounded hill, is refined with exceptional skill and supplies architecture beyond the achievements of earthly empires. The poet does not make magnificent workmanship a guarantee of moral worth. Infernal power can produce a building that inspires admiration. What has been made, how it has been obtained and what it serves must still be considered. ^[2]

The gold in Blake’s actual painting makes that passage especially suggestive. Loukes’s adapted discussion proposes a possible symbolic connection between the gold leaf and Milton’s infernal riches. No surviving explanation by Blake is offered for that connection. ^[1]

It gives the viewer a useful question to carry around the picture. The precious colour is attractive, but it belongs to a place of burning and confinement. Light catches the forms without opening a route out of their environment. The same gold that helps Satan emerge also runs through the world beneath him, joining his conspicuous body to the conditions of his followers.

Milton’s famous account of flames producing visible darkness is similarly difficult to reduce to a single visual effect. The fire reveals misery while withholding the comfort normally associated with light. Blake’s dense surface allows figures to emerge gradually as we look. That experience of discovering bodies within darkness suits the poem, although the painting’s present appearance should not be treated as a precise record of its original colours or condition. ^[2]

The earlier experiment and the later painting

The Petworth picture is the second tempera treatment of this composition. The earlier experiment, now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, was exhibited in 1809. Blake’s catalogue describes it as preparation for a more finished picture made for an unnamed high-ranking woman. Petworth’s probable patron was Elizabeth Ilive, Countess of Egremont; the collection’s provenance spells her surname Iliffe. ^{[1] [9]}

The distinction matters because Blake’s account of the exhibited experiment is unusually candid. He says that it was painted intermittently to test colours without an oily vehicle. Repeated work consumed several times the labour required for a finished picture and damaged its defining forms. Recovering something of the earlier effect became a struggle. These remarks concern the experimental predecessor; they are not a report of what happened to the Petworth canvas. ^[9]

His difficulty also explains the extraordinary turn the entry takes. An account of materials becomes an attack on the influence of other painters. Blake describes how admired pictures can occupy an artist’s memory until an individual conception is replaced by someone else’s manner. The struggle is partly with imitation: the hand sets to work, but inherited expectations disturb what the painter originally imagined. ^[9]

Here he calls chiaroscuro, the organisation of light and shade, an “infernal machine”. His objection is directed towards a practice he associates with the Venetian and Flemish schools, in which brown shadows obscure execution and weaken the authority of drawing. His experiment with a medium free of oil accompanies a wider defence of distinct, expressive form. ^[9]

The preceding exhibition advertisement promotes a portable form of fresco on canvas or wood, and the catalogue’s preface makes outline fundamental to colour. These are Blake’s claims for his own practice. They help explain why losing the lineaments of a figure could feel like more than a disappointing technical result. A painter who wanted form to carry imaginative character had found his repeated attempts threatening the very thing he valued. ^[9]

That history gives the Petworth composition another kind of interest. Satan’s limbs must remain sufficiently distinct to command the crowded field, while fire, rock and the surrounding bodies continually press around them. We can follow the clear upward reach and the many obstructed outlines beneath it. The picture asks the viewer to find human form within a material world whose effects can be both compelling and difficult to control.

Returning to the subject in watercolour

Blake later reconsidered the summons in a different composition, itself repeated in watercolour. The Huntington’s 1807 sheet, 000.1, offers a useful comparison. Satan stands much nearer the viewer, with his shield and spear clearly beside him. The figures form a more regular arrangement around his body, and a seated captive with knees drawn up occupies the foreground directly below his feet. The owner’s catalogue explicitly distinguishes this design from the two earlier temperas. ^[13]

In the Petworth painting, by comparison, the eye must travel through a far more compressed environment to reach the summit. Airborne bodies, lower clusters and the central hollow make a deep, unstable setting around the leader. The watercolour makes individual positions easier to compare across the page; the tempera immerses those positions in the burning place they inhabit. Each composition finds a different balance between the figure who calls and the multitude called.

The fuller sequence is explored in Blake’s Paradise Lost illustrations. The Petworth painting’s date also overlaps the years around his stay at Felpham, although its execution in Sussex is a possibility rather than a documented certainty. The collection records its later descent and the acceptance of the major Petworth collections in lieu of death duties in 1956. ^[1]

Returning to the painting after the poem and the experimental history, Satan’s apparent freedom becomes more demanding to look at. He can stand, extend his arms and occupy the brightest opening. Below him, strength takes the form of bodies that cling, fold or remain pressed together. Blake gives the summons an imposing speaker, then surrounds him with the difficult lives over which his voice must pass.