The Simoniac Pope

A naked man hangs head down inside an enormous circular well. Flames rise from his feet, while his shoulders, face and outstretched hands remain visible through its curved wall. Above him, two clothed figures cling together on a ledge. William Blake’s The Simoniac Pope makes a punishment that should be largely hidden disturbingly accessible to sight. We can look into the imprisoned body’s space even though the travellers remain outside it. ^[1]

The sufferer is Pope Nicholas III, encountered by Dante and his guide Virgil in the nineteenth canto of Inferno. His offence is simony: turning sacred authority into something bought and sold. Blake’s ink and watercolour, dated 1824–7, belongs to Tate and measures 527 × 368 mm. Its upright format gives the headlong body an extraordinary prominence, stretching the episode between the human shelter above and the confinement below. ^[1][2]

Which pope is in the well?

The scene takes place in the third trench of the eighth circle of Dante’s Hell. The previous canto introduces this region, Malebolge, as ten concentric ditches crossed by rocky bridges. Moving from one trench to another means crossing banks, looking down and sometimes descending to speak with an individual soul. Blake concentrates that extensive geography into a single cavern and a single punishment. ^[2]

In canto XIX, Dante notices one pair of feet kicking more violently than the others, under a fiercer flame. Virgil offers to carry him down the slope so that he can discover the sufferer’s identity. The living poet’s first question produces a mistake: the buried pope assumes that Boniface VIII has arrived to replace him. At Virgil’s prompting, Dante denies being the expected man. Only then does the speaker identify himself through his papal office and his family, the Orsini. ^[2]

The distinction matters whenever the picture is captioned. Boniface is named in the dialogue, but Nicholas is the soul presently enduring the flames. Dante sets the journey in 1300, before Boniface’s death in 1303. The exchange makes an accusation against a pope still alive within the imagined date of the action. Boniface’s anticipated arrival is part of Nicholas’s knowledge and anxiety; it does not put his body in the illustrated well. ^[1][2]

Nicholas also predicts a still worse successor, identified as Clement V. Each arrival will push the previous occupant deeper into the opening, where earlier simoniacs already lie. The University of Leeds’s Dante guide clearly distinguishes these three positions: Nicholas speaks, Boniface is expected, and Clement will follow. Blake’s isolated body represents one visible moment in a succession that the poem extends beneath the surface and into the future. ^[2][14]

That succession offers no release from Hell. Replacement means being driven farther down among predecessors, not being pardoned or allowed to leave. Nor is this a queue in which every soul appears in turn before the viewer. Dante describes those already below Nicholas’s head, making the unseen depth part of the punishment. Blake’s much more revealing treatment of the well allows us to see Nicholas’s body, while leaving that accumulated company out of sight. ^[2]

Sacred gifts made into property

The canto begins by addressing Simon Magus and those who follow his example. The biblical story lies in Acts 8. Simon sees that people receive the Holy Spirit when the apostles lay hands upon them and offers money for the same power. Peter rejects the offer because a divine gift cannot be purchased. The passage gives Dante’s accusation a precise starting point: spiritual authority has been mistaken for a transferable possession. ^[2][15]

Dante develops the offence through the language of corrupted marriage. Things belonging to God should be joined to goodness, but the simoniacs have prostituted them for silver and gold. Nicholas supplies a particularly personal version of that charge. Describing his eagerness to advance his family, he connects the wealth he once put into his purse with the hole into which he has now put himself. The language turns acquisitiveness back upon the acquisitor. ^[2]

The place of punishment also recalls a sacred setting. Dante compares the holes to baptismal fonts in Florence’s Baptistery of San Giovanni. He interrupts the description to recall breaking one to rescue a child in danger of drowning. That remembered rescue makes a sharp companion to the bodies now embedded head first in stone. A setting associated with Christian entry and renewal has become a setting of confinement and torment. ^[2]

Blake expands one opening into a great round vessel. Its broad elliptical rim makes the hollow immediately legible, and its size gives the familiar shape an oppressive weight. The visible arrangement offers an accessible way into the canto’s inversion: the feet rise where a head ought to be, while the speaking face is driven below the surface. Authority has become helplessness. ^[1][2]

Dante’s response is equally specific. He asks what treasure Christ demanded before giving Peter the keys, then recalls that the apostles took no payment when Matthias was chosen to replace Judas. He accuses the corrupt churchmen of trampling the good and elevating the wicked. Near the end of the speech, he laments the wealth associated with Constantine’s gift to the papacy. In each instance, the abuse concerns the worldly handling of an authority whose origin was spiritual. ^[2]

Fire has a sacred counterpart too. In Acts 2, tongues resembling fire rest upon the assembled believers as they receive the Holy Spirit. Read beside that passage, the flames on the simoniacs’ feet form a bitter reversal: what appears above the faithful at Pentecost burns the raised feet of those who abused spiritual power. The University of Leeds places the Pentecost passage alongside its discussion of the canto’s religious language. The comparison sharpens the significance of the burning soles without requiring us to assign a separate hidden meaning to every flame Blake paints. ^[14][15]

Yet Dante says that reverence for the papal keys restrains the severity of his words. His anger at Nicholas coexists with respect for the office Nicholas held. Reading the whole speech preserves that tension. The episode condemns a form of religious corruption from within Dante’s Christian moral world, and its violence should not be flattened into a general rejection of Christian belief. ^[2]

Looking through an impossible wall

Dante originally sees only the feet and lower legs protruding from the holes. The rest of each body is concealed. Blake makes a decisive alteration: the enormous front of the well can be seen through, so that Nicholas’s head, back, shoulders and arms remain exposed to us. The curve of the rim continues across the figure, establishing a boundary without allowing that boundary to hide him. ^[1][2]

The device gives the spectator more information than the travellers possess. We see both the opening and the body beneath it at once. Nicholas’s head turns towards the left, his bent arms spread out, and the open fingers seem to seek a hold that the smooth enclosure cannot provide. He is suspended inside a container whose rounded shape answers the rounded crown of his head. The well’s scale makes his captivity monumental without turning him into a tiny, distant victim. ^[1]

His legs do not form a stiff vertical column. The knees bend, the feet separate and the soles tilt at different angles. Around them, narrow tongues of flame rise into branching dark contours, with pale yellow and orange washes inside. The irregularity echoes the canto’s restless movement: Dante describes burning that runs over the soles and violent motions of the joints. Blake can hold those movements before us, allowing us to follow the pressure through the anatomy. ^[1][2]

There is a revealing difference between the figure’s upper and lower situations. The feet emerge into a bright concentration of flame, while the torso sinks into the broad, warmer-toned wall. The dark blue rim cuts across the middle of this passage. Our eye can travel downward through the body’s contours, but it also meets the well’s strong horizontal curve. A simple act of looking becomes a repeated encounter between bodily continuity and enclosure. ^[1]

The surrounding space repeats that pressure on a larger scale. Dark rock closes around the upper scene, creating an arch above the travellers. Jagged lines split the side walls, and blue washes collect among the broken shapes. Near the bottom, swelling blue and orange forms curl around the base of the vessel. They give the ground an agitated movement, as though the place of confinement were itself surrounded by currents that cannot settle. ^[1]

Blake thus exchanges Dante’s open trench for a cave. Martin Butlin’s Tate catalogue reads the enclosure as an emphasis on spiritual darkness. The visual effect is also immediate: the rock supplies no broad horizon through which to escape. Even the pale area behind the travellers is bounded by the cavern’s dark edges. Their close-held bodies occupy a pocket of space above a much larger curved prison. ^[1]

The bodies above the flames

Virgil and Dante are easy to overlook at first because the inverted pope commands so much attention. They occupy the upper part of the sheet, pressed together beneath the arch. The bearded guide’s bent head is beside Dante’s paler face, and the enclosing arms make their two figures read as a compact group. Folded drapery and a planted foot connect that group to the sloping ledge. ^[1]

Their posture answers Nicholas’s in several ways. His body extends downwards and his arms open without support; theirs draw inward and hold. His separated feet writhe above the vessel; the travellers have a precarious but usable footing. One person has another’s help, while the other has only the repeated movement of his own limbs. ^[1]

The end of the canto explains that embrace. After Dante’s rebuke, Nicholas moves his feet violently, whether through anger or a troubled conscience. Virgil appears pleased with Dante’s words, takes him in both arms and retraces the difficult ascent. He continues holding his burden until he can place him safely on the rock above. The tenderness of that final movement belongs to the primary text, alongside the savage attack on the pope. ^[2]

Tate’s gallery label emphasises Virgil’s protection of Dante from the fiery pit; the catalogue connects the clasp with carrying him away after Nicholas’s angry response. Both direct attention to a practical action that helps locate the depicted moment. The travellers are passing through this region. They have approached the punishment, spoken and begun to withdraw. Nothing in the canto suggests that they are fellow simoniacs trying to avoid the sentence imposed on Nicholas. ^[1][2]

Blake gives the exchange a bodily aftermath. Nicholas’s agitation persists after the conversation. The closeness of the two travellers belongs to the next action, their departure. Their positions allow the picture to contain the aftermath of an argument and the physical work of continuing the journey. ^[1][2]

Blake’s sympathy and his objection

The reversal of spiritual and material values offered Blake a powerful subject. Butlin suggests that this element of Dante’s punishment would have accorded with his own concerns. The picture gives the fallen churchman neither a throne nor ceremonial dignity; his exposed anatomy occupies the place where office and wealth once made him powerful. Dante’s accusation already supplies the image with a severe criticism of religious authority used for gain. ^[1][2]

That point of sympathy does not settle Blake’s response to Hell itself. In his notes on a separate diagram of Dante’s nine circles, he questions how a God who gives sun and rain to good and evil alike could have built such a place. He associates vengeance and resistance to forgiveness with Satan the accuser. Those are Blake’s explicit written objections, and they make it difficult to treat every illustrated torment as his uncomplicated approval of the sentence. ^[16]

The diagram is a different work, and it gives no instruction for decoding every mark in The Simoniac Pope. Its value here is to keep two questions open together: how Blake represents Nicholas’s corruption, and how he regards the divine punishment imagined by Dante. The visible severity can engage the first question without resolving the second. The protective embrace above the well remains especially compelling within a series whose illustrator could challenge the justice of its punishments. ^[1][2][16]

A late drawing with a later history

John Linnell commissioned the Dante project in 1824, and Blake continued working on it until his death in 1827. The surviving drawings vary in their degree of completion. The Simoniac Pope belongs to this late undertaking; its inscription identifies Hell and canto 19. The catalogue also records a 1796 watermark in its paper, a material date that precedes the execution of the picture by several decades. ^[1][3]

This sheet is an ink and watercolour drawing. It was not one of the seven Dante compositions Blake took into engraving before he died. The seven were issued together by Linnell in 1838, but their publication date does not date the present watercolour. The wider relationship between the drawn and engraved series is explored in Blake’s illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. ^[17]

The drawing remained with Linnell’s family before the Dante group was sold at Christie’s in 1918. Tate acquired its sheets through the National Art-Collections Fund in 1919, with assistance from a special National Gallery grant and donors including Lord Duveen. The separate artwork now has its own museum history, while its narrative still depends upon the journey surrounding it. ^[1][18]

That journey brings the viewer back to the ledge. The pope’s feet will continue to move, and another arrival will drive him farther down. Dante can leave because someone holds him and carries him upwards. Blake makes that difference visible through two opposing arrangements of the body: the isolated man displayed through his prison, and the two travellers gathered into an embrace. ^[1][2]