This print is one of the proofs for the first edition of Phillips' Dante's Inferno. The completed prints were destroyed in a fire at the Editions Alecto studio and never published as an edition. This print depicts intertwined figures suggesting sexual intercourse. Part of A Hument page has been collaged onto the print with a poem that reads, "all the time -For all the time - a curse for ever! - a tissue of interlacing twofold consciousness - ourselves united - passion all the time." Phillips subsequently redid the prints in a different manner although he borrowed some of the imagery from the first edition. The prints in a limited edition and a trade edition book were published by Phillips and Thames and Hudson, respectively. Tom Phillips altered this image in Canto V in his final version of the Inferno such that the calligraphic text was eliminated, the background was changed from black to gray and pink, a giant phallus with balls was depicted, and only the Humument text without the page present. The entwined male and female figures are less distinct against the new background, but the geometrical forms of the background suggest sexual intercourse. The Humument poem reads the same, "all the time -For all the time - a curse for ever! - a tissue of interlacing twofold consciousness - ourselves united - passion all the time." In his iconographical notes and commentary on the illustrations in the Thames and Hudson edition Phillips writes, "The punishment for illicit love, at least in the case of Paolo and Francesca, seems to be that the lovers are locked in an eternal embrace, the greatest pain to be the infinite repetition on an initially pleasurable act. The coital couple here repeated to represent that fate are taken from a film still (I don't remember the name of the film) from a 1978 issue of Time Out. The appearance here of an interior text, unusual in the frontispiece of a Canto, shows that it was one of the first illustrations to be devised, ie. before the eventual strategies of the book were settled upon. The entire picture is itself repeated in reverse/negative to open Canto XV which deals with the sodomites." This work was shown at the Sackner Archive during Art Basel Miami December 2001. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.