Divina Commedia Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Butlin #812.100 is an illustration that suggests the characters (Purgatorio 13) Sapia (the supine figure has a stitch closing its eye and is female) and Piero (described, inaccurately, as a "hermit" in the Cary translation, and of course in almost all of the old commentary tradition); Blake has Sapia supine and on a flaming water-margin to indicate her close call in avoiding damnation for her blasphemy; Piero is in a hermit's cave as Blake liked to draw them (see "Milton: Old Age" illustration to "Il Penseroso") and has the accoutrements for the psalm-recitation (the book) and self-flagellation (the two curlicues at least suggest *disciplinae*) that Peter Damian describes as helping, if used by holy hermits, the souls in Purgatory. Despite scant English translation, by the 1820s, of Damian's writings, he is noted in De Lolme's _History of the Flagellants_, and in English print available to Blake (Hagiography, Biography in Encyclopediae, Religious Polemic) for his ghost stories, theories of Purgatory and prayer for the dead, and systematic attention to penance including self-flagellation and psalm recitation. English translators of Dante--Boyd especially, but also Cary--felt it necessary to explain the doctrine of Purgatory, and of prayer for the dead, to their mostly-Protestant English audiences. Our Blake drawing may have been intended (in a portfolio for the whole *Commedia* had Blake lived to engrave it) to go between the section of illustrations for *Purgatorio* and those for *Paradiso* showing the curious and interesting custom of penance and prayer for the souls in Purgatory to an audience of Regency English. It may have other references to places in Dante's text, as late Blake illustrations are wont: the hermit Blake depicts may have been intended to at least resonate with Peter Damian's praise of the life of eremitical penance, and the landscape setting--a river flowing through the mountains to a hermit's cell at their base--with Fonte Avellana, which the soul of Peter Damian celebrates in *Paradiso* Canto 21.. John Linnell, the patron for this project, seems to have stumbled on an error by the translator Henry Boyd,, which led Linnell to add the gratuitous and bizarre inscription--"Hell Canto 18"--to his tracing of this drawing, made in 1831. Linnell, reading Boyd's mangled account of the composition of the *Commedia*, may have thought this Blake drawing was a representation of a hermit at Fonte Avellana. Despite Boyd's garbling and Linnell's possible acceptance of it, this illustration may after all have chosen, for the location of a hermit, a scene like the hermitage of Fonte Avellana, for a representation of a hermit (as Blake and nearly every Dante scholar thought Pier was) in penitential solitude, helping the soul of Sapia. If Blake shared the notion Linnell seems to have received from Boyd's error, there is then an outside chance this could be an epitome of (possibly a frontispiece for) the whole *Commedia* project--showing the site of composition of its last 83 cantos--but this is unlikely. In any other event, this drawing of a hermit doing penance for a soul belongs with the *Purgatorio* illustrations--probably going, as John Flaxman's epitome of *Purgatorio* did, after that canticle and before *Paradiso*--either as an epitome of penance for souls in Purgatory, or (what is I think least likely) as an illustration to Canto 13.