The Serpent Attacking Buoso Donati

The serpent has bitten, but the man has not fallen. He bends sideways, his hands spread beside his head, and looks down towards the creature turning below him. Between them, smoke curls into a thick, suspended knot. At the left, three spectators follow the encounter with different degrees of alarm. William Blake makes a strangely prolonged instant out of an attack: the wound has begun a process that the victim can watch but cannot stop. ^[1][2]

The Serpent Attacking Buoso Donati illustrates the twenty-fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno. Its subject is an exchange of bodies between two thieves, one human and the other temporarily a serpent. Blake engraved the composition in 1826–27. The illustration reproduced here shows that engraved design, although the exact impression and its printing date remain unidentified. Tate’s A00009 provides a documented comparison: its copperplate design dates from Blake’s last years, while its own paper impression is catalogued as reprinted in 1892. ^[1]

Blake also made a separate ink and watercolour version, now Tate N03361, dated 1824–27. The principal figures occupy the same sides of the scene, making comparison unusually rewarding. The watercolour lets blue-grey washes pass across bodies and atmosphere; the print constructs their weight, darkness and movement through countless incised strokes. Each medium finds a different way to describe a human form on the verge of becoming something else. ^[1][3]

The bite that begins an exchange

Dante and his guide, Virgil, have reached the seventh trench of Hell’s eighth circle, where thieves suffer among serpents. By this point, the poem has already shown more than one kind of bodily transformation. In canto XXIV, Vanni Fucci is pierced at the neck, burns into ashes and reassembles in his previous shape. Early in canto XXV, a six-footed serpent grips another thief, Agnolo Brunelleschi, and their two forms melt into a single disturbing creature. These episodes establish a world in which the human body offers no secure protection against change. ^[2]

Buoso’s encounter has a different structure. A small, dark serpent approaches with the speed of a lizard crossing a road in the summer heat. It pierces the man at the place where life first receives nourishment, which Henry Francis Cary’s note identifies as the navel. The serpent drops down before him. Buoso remains motionless and silent, yawning as though overtaken by sleep or fever. The attack opens a period of suspended awareness before the more elaborate anatomical changes begin. ^[2]

Cary translates the crucial encounter in a short, balanced sentence:

He ey’d the serpent, and the serpent him. ^[2]

The joining smoke follows. One column rises from the wound, the other from the serpent’s mouth, and the two meet. Blake places this connection near the centre of the image. The smoke makes a visible route between otherwise separate bodies: it occupies the empty space through which their identities will seem to pass. Its round, swelling turns answer the serpent’s long loop below. ^[1][2]

The poem then describes reciprocal changes. The serpent’s tail divides as the man’s legs join; one skin softens while the other hardens. Limbs lengthen on one body and withdraw into the other. Ears, noses, hair and tongues change their form, and the creatures exchange upright and prone positions. Buoso becomes a serpent, while the serpent regains a human body. The final distinction is audible: one hisses away, and the other has recovered speech. This is a theft of bodily condition in which the aggressor gains what his victim loses. ^[2]

Tate identifies the serpent as Francesco de’ Cavalcanti. The poem reveals the participants gradually, while Cary’s commentary supplies names behind its allusions. Buoso is named after the transformation, when the newly human speaker tells him to crawl along the path as he himself has done. The title therefore gives the viewer information that Dante’s reader acquires only as the episode unfolds. It enables us to recognise the victim before the exchange has made recognition difficult. ^[2][3]

Three people watching

The two robed figures at the far left are Dante and Virgil. Their proximity gives them the appearance of a close pair, with the rear face visible beside the head of the man in front. Raised hands interrupt the long vertical fall of the foremost robe. The hands face out into the scene, their fingers carefully separated, as though the spectator’s first response has become a physical barrier. The two faces share an object of attention, but they do not become interchangeable witnesses. ^[1]

Beside them, the naked observer turns towards Buoso. One arm crosses his upper body, bringing a hand close to the opposite shoulder or neck; the other extends downwards and back. His crossed stance appears less secure than the travellers’ broad robes. Blake sets another exposed human body beside the endangered one, making the difference between watching and undergoing the attack immediately visible. The observer still possesses the form that Buoso is about to lose. ^[1]

Tate’s catalogue identifies this third spectator as Puccio Sciancato. At the end of the canto, Dante singles out Sciancato as the one member of the original three thieves who has not changed. That later statement helps identify the figure’s role here. The picture’s spectator belongs to the same condemned company as the victim, whereas the two clothed poets are passing through it. Shared horror momentarily brings the three witnesses together without giving them a shared position within the story. ^[2][3]

Their arrangement also controls the viewer’s approach. The cluster at the left faces into a larger interval occupied by the serpent, smoke and bending man. We can begin with the spectators and follow their attention across the picture, or meet Buoso first and then discover other people already looking at him. Blake includes the act of looking within the event. His composition makes it hard to imagine the transformation as a private experience sealed off from observers. ^[1]

A loop drawn on the ground

The serpent’s body sweeps across the lower centre in a broad, almost closed curve. A long, tapering extension climbs towards the man’s abdomen, while the angular head turns into the space beneath the smoke. The loop is large enough to organise much of the foreground. It holds an area of nearly empty ground inside it, giving the creature a reach that exceeds the small scale suggested by Dante’s swiftly approaching reptile. Blake turns a brief darting movement into a shape the eye can follow slowly. ^[1][2]

In the engraving, the creature’s surface is especially articulate. Repeated small divisions make a patterned hide along the outer curve. Thin projecting points break its upper edge, and the head has an angular, elaborate profile. The narrow curve beside Buoso’s legs draws the eye upwards towards the wound. Beside it, the smoke’s tightly curving lines expand into rounded masses, a softer movement suspended above the patterned animal body. The two kinds of mark keep creature and vapour distinguishable while joining their movement. ^[1]

Buoso’s body rises above this looping construction. Shading follows the swelling thighs, the rib cage and the upper arm, turning each muscular region into a distinct volume. His knees remain apart, and the feet still bear his weight. The head inclines towards the serpent even as the torso curves away from it. That division of movement is unsettling: his body recoils, but his attention remains caught. The spread fingers give the recoil a delicate extremity beyond the heavier masses of shoulder and chest. ^[1]

The surrounding landscape extends the unease. Narrow, pointed forms rise behind the central spectator, while a heavy bank of cloud stretches across the upper border. Fine strokes descend from its scalloped edge into the pale opening behind Buoso. The upper darkness and the needle-like forms below seem to press towards the space in which the figures stand. Yet the ground remains open enough for every gesture to register clearly. Blake surrounds the encounter without concealing its mechanics. ^[1]

What the watercolour changes

Tate’s watercolour measures 372 by 527 millimetres across its paper support. It belongs to the larger body of Dante illustrations from which the seven engraved compositions were selected. Here, the broad arrangement is familiar, but the body at the right takes on a different physical presence. Blue-grey shading crosses the chest and legs, while dark contours give the outline force. Faint warmth survives in parts of the flesh and across the ground. ^[1][3]

The serpent is darker and less insistently patterned than in the print. Its long outer curve is carried by a wash, with relatively open passages around its head. The smoke rises in pale blue-grey, at moments barely stronger than the surface beneath it. Looking through those light passages is quite different from following the print’s densely turned lines. In watercolour, the connection between mouth and wound can seem to hover at the threshold of visibility. In the engraving, it becomes a conspicuous, structured presence. ^[1][3]

Tate’s June 2024 display caption interprets the blue and grey of the thief’s body as suggesting the withdrawal of human life into coldness. This brings attention to the immediate sensation of looking at the flesh. Its coolness feels particularly marked beside the warmer ground and the reddish touches in the atmosphere. The museum’s reading concerns the loss of his human condition; the narrative continues through transformation rather than ending with a corpse. ^[2][3]

Luisa Calè offers a related comparison in her study of Blake’s serpent transformations. She observes that the watercolour gives man and serpent shared blue-black and grey tones, although Blake models the man’s muscular volume more fully. Colour links the bodies before their exchanged shapes can be seen. She also reads the two successive Buoso watercolours as a way of making a simultaneous exchange understandable through separate moments. Tate’s catalogue identifies the following design as showing the completed transformation. This image can therefore carry the beginning of an action whose outcome belongs beyond its own edges. ^[3][15]

Colour also makes the setting less uniform. The dark blue at the upper left is broken by pale areas and long, thin washes. Warm streaks descend behind Buoso; sharper blue points gather behind the observer. Large parts of the paper remain lightly worked. The print redistributes that contrast through engraved darkness, leaving a broad pale interval behind the victim. Neither version needs a crowded background to make the open space feel threatening. ^[1][3]

What remains while the body changes

Dante interrupts the description to challenge the ancient poets Lucan and Ovid. Their famous transformations, he declares, never achieved this exchange in which two creatures simultaneously take each other’s substance. The boast makes the episode a test of representation as well as an extraordinary punishment. A reader must hold two changing bodies in mind at once, tracking each alteration against its opposite. Blake confronts a comparable difficulty with a motionless image. He gives the viewer two complete forms, a meeting of eyes and a visible connection between them, making the coming exchange imaginable before depicting its results. ^[1][2]

The gaze is the most enduring part of the encounter. In Cary’s account, the malignant eyes retain their direction while the features beneath them alter. The surrounding anatomy becomes unstable, but each creature continues confronting the other. Blake chooses the instant that establishes this relationship, before the two bodies have visibly exchanged their defining structures. Looking is both an action the man can still perform and a sign of his inability to turn away. ^[1][2]

Dante makes the loss of speech equally precise. A human tongue divides, while a forked tongue closes together. What appears to be an alteration of shape changes the capacity to address another person. The newly human Cavalcanti immediately uses his recovered voice against Buoso. The exchange does not create reconciliation between the thieves. It equips one with the power to speak while forcing the other into a different kind of sound. ^[2]

Blake’s image keeps the bodies separate enough for this reciprocity to matter. A fusion would produce one composite creature, as in the earlier Agnolo episode; here the serpent and man face each other across a shared current of smoke. The open ground preserves the interval between them even while the smoke crosses it. Each has something the other will acquire. The composition makes their connection forceful without dissolving them into a single mass. ^[1][2]

This gives the exposed human body a particular poignancy. Its carefully differentiated muscles and extremities are temporarily intact. We can follow shoulders, knees, toes and fingers as ordinary features, while the poem tells us that each is vulnerable to being remade. Close attention becomes a way of feeling the threatened loss of a familiar structure. The spectator’s similarly modelled body intensifies that effect: the scene contains a visible comparison between human form retained and human form at risk. ^[1][2]

The design and its printed sheets

The engraving translates these anatomical distinctions into a network of cuts. Robert N. Essick identifies drypoint and engraving, without etching, as the techniques of the Dante plates: preliminary lines were scratched with a needle, while the graver removed metal to create stronger incisions. That account helps explain why Blake’s engraved work should be approached as a process of developing marks, with different tools contributing to their eventual appearance on paper. ^[4]

A finished-looking reproduction does not itself establish a plate’s completed state or an impression’s age. Essick’s study describes early working states of several other Dante plates, including The Falsifiers, but it supplies no equivalent description of an early Buoso state in that list. Their proof differences cannot be transferred to this composition. The evidence for Buoso here lies in the engraved image, its documented place in the suite and the separate records of particular sheets. ^[1][4]

When the seven engravings were issued in 1838, their cover label identified plate V through Cary’s sentence about the exchanged gaze. The choice is revealing. It directs attention to the sustained confrontation after the bite, even though the title is usually remembered as an attack. The published label offered a way into the composition through the relationship between two looking creatures. ^[1]

Tate’s later impression records another stage in that history. Its current image measurement is 242 by 336 millimetres; the primary paper support and the secondary support have their own, larger measurements. These belong to A00009. They do not identify the paper shown in every reproduction of Blake’s design. The longer history of editions belongs with Blake’s prints, while this encounter remains readable across the surviving impressions. ^[1][4]

A second, uncertain image on the back

The watercolour’s long museum title includes a small graphite drawing on its reverse: a man whose head appears enclosed by a transparent hood or bubble. Butlin’s catalogue cautiously considers a possible serpent transformation, while acknowledging the absence of an exact parallel among the Dante illustrations. An inscription referring to canto XXIII does not securely identify the sketch as one of that canto’s hooded hypocrites. The back of the sheet preserves another unresolved act of drawing, separate from the clearly identified encounter on the front. ^[3]

The main composition gives uncertainty a more immediate shape. A serpent has attacked a man who still stands before us as human, yet the smoke already connects him to the creature he will become. The witnesses can register the event, and Buoso can maintain his gaze, but none can arrest the exchange. Blake holds the body at the last moment when its familiar parts remain fully available to sight. ^[1][2]