Against the Middle Way: William Blake's Illustration to Dante's Inferno, Canto 2 <Articles>

William Blake's final, unfinished series of pictures was a set of illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. Letters, marginal notes, and other comments by Blake indicate that while he respected Dante as a thinker and poet, he did not agree with Dante's theology. It is my contention in this paper that Blake intended his Dante pictures as "corrections" to the text of the Comedy, not merely as illustrations. Convincing scholarly work has shown that Blake undertook similar projects with both Milton's Paradise Lost and the Old Testament's Book of Job, amending the original author's message and adding a layer of his own meaning. In the case of his Job illustrations, Blake's reinterpretation was accomplished solely through visual, iconographic means, without adding original text. I believe that the Comedy pictures were designed to accomplish a similar end. In this paper I will examine a portion of the watercolor illustration to the second canto of the Inferno, to show how Blake introduces a visual symbol of his own that analyzes and criticizes Dante's moral system