Scope and Contents

Phillips' dedication reads "for Ruth and Marvin Sackner, patrons, friends who guard my work between them like book ends." The first revision of the book contains 50 pages in which a new image has been substituted for the original. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

Phillips dedication reads "for Ruth and Marvin Sackner, patrons, friends who guard my work between them like book ends." The cover and title page state that this is the second revised edition and is the only such copy printed with this caption. Its has a tan background color. This edition contains about 100 pages in which a new image has been substituted for the original. It was used by Tom Phillips for a reading at the Dual Muse symposium held at the Washington University Museum of Art. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

This book was produced with the assistance of Jonathan Meyer to mark and celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the publication of A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. The binding was produced by Pella Erskine-Tulloch. The 74 prints were made with a Canon Laser Color Copier and tipped onto the pages. The two silkscreened prints are an integral part of the pages. The images are taken from the first, second, and forth-coming third edition. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

Bluebeard's Castle by Ronald King, "Ein Deutsches Reqyiem - After Brahms" by Tom Phillips, "S.M.S." Issues No.1,3,4,5, "De Morandi" by Ian Tyson, and "Selected Shorter Poems" by Emmett Williams, which were exhibited, are held by the Sackner Archive. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Canto I/1 Phillips comments: The dense, direct and haunting opening to Dante's Comedy: Just halfway through this journey of our life I came awake to find myself inside a dark wood, way off course, the right road lost. shares immediately with the reader that claustrophobia of accumulated habit and error which reveals to human beings in middle life that they have been building a trap around themselves, which, having had no formal entrance, offers no apparent way out. In this image I have further developed a procedure used in several paintings from 1969 on (cf. Works/Texts to 1974 pp 74 & 184) involving stencilled letters. With the title phrase Una Selva Oscura (a Dark Wood) I have made a linguistic thicket by superimposing letters of different height so that this phrase crosses and cancels itself over and over again. Thus the title, moving in and out of phase, becomes the picture, in the manner of a fugue or canon in music. The motif, and variations on it, reappears throughout...

Scope and Contents Canto 1/3 Phillips comments: Like all great literature Dante's Comedy grows from the body of literature that precedes it. The illustrations here frequently emphasise the fact that Inferno is a book that contains books; books that it models itself upon (the Aeneid) and books that it transcends (the Tesoro of Ser Brunetto; cf. Canto XV/2). Virgil is here represented in the form in which Dante first knows him, his work, and in particular the Aeneid of which this is perhaps the first page of a sumptuous illuminated manuscript; hence the initial `A' for the opening of the epic, Arma virumque cano (Arms and the Man, I sing. . .). Dante would have seen such volumes in the mansions of his wealthy patrons: we do not however know how many books the peripatetic exile actually owned; books at that date are handwritten, huge, heavy and very expensive. It is doubtful that Dante owned a complete Bible even: he probably owned fewer than Chaucer's scholar with his 'twenty books clad in black and...

Scope and Contents Canto II/1 This companion-piece to Dante in his Study shows Virgil in a similar room. The positions of the figure and the book derive also from Signorelli, but more remotely. Since no authoritative image of Virgil exists he is pictured without features. As with Dante the hands are my own and drawn from life. He is poised over the book of his Works. It is open at the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, the principal source for the Inferno. A bookmark indicates the Fourth Eclogue in which Virgil (as it seemed to the mediaeval world) prophesied the Coming of Christ. The Eagle of the Empire signifies Virgil's allegiance to the other Rome (a separation much to Dante's political tastes). In the left hand corner a distorted star with seven points and inscribed with alchemical devices is falling from the framework of the picture. This refers to Virgil's role in the mediaeval thought as a Magus (his book was used as a work of divination in the manner of the I Ching), a reputation Dante is eager to...

Scope and Contents 11/2 Phillips comments: The lily, as well as being the emblem of Dante's native city, is the flower of the Annunciation, and a traditional attribute of the Virgin Mary. The speech of Beatrice to Virgil, entrusting him with the mission of saving his fellow poet, is a cryptic parallel to the Annunciation: thus Beatrice (also of course a Florentine) is associated with the Virgin Mary and this is the spiritual counterpart of her role in Dante's life, as the Lady of his love and art. The enclosure, here represented as a lawn surrounded by a triangle of walls, is part of the standard iconography of the Annunciation (hortus conclusus) as is the locked entranceway which symbolises virginity. The three steps prefigure those of the Angel in Purgatorio. In the sky above are the nine circles of Paradise of which the nine rings of Hell are the infernal counterparts. The lily itself is constructed (cf. notes to the frontispiece) according to the Golden Section and derives from a wall-painting...

Scope and Contents

II/4 Dante likens his renewed morale to the opening up of flowers which close at night. The various stages of the daffodil (chosen as a flower of this season of pilgrimage) as it unfolds were etched from life in 1978 and formed part of one of the first images to be tackled. The rising sun, also an emblem of renewed vigour, pictured over the sea, echoes two of Dante's images for Virgil as well as contrasting with the twilight opening of the canto. The Virgin Butterfly, her mission fulfilled, departs. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Canto III/1 A portfolio of etchings that I worked on in 1979 appeared under the title 'I had not known death had undone so many', T. S. Eliot's beautiful translation of a line from this canto. The heads here are much in the same vein and similarly influenced by African Art (notably some rock drawings I studied in Namaqualand) and the appearance of diatoms under a microscope. They are similarly used in that certain of them are chosen to be hugely enlarged to make stylised masks of characters in the Inferno as with Homer in Canto IV, Aristotle in Cantos XI and XXX etc. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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III/2 Yellow, the colour of cowardice, pervades this image which represents the lukewarm and indecisive souls who follow a banner sans device. The heads are repeated, somewhat enlarged since we are now nearer to them, from the previous picture and one head is singled out for further enlargement and emphasis to represent Pope Constantine who 'made the great refusal'. The outline of the flag is adapted from that shown on the cover of Works/Texts to 1974 (where its previous history is described). -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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III/3 Not satisfied with any of the colour trials I made in the first version of this, which depicted the dreary waters of the Styx, I cut the various proofs into strips and brought different versions into conjunction, hence the appropriate half repetition of the short text which, together with the recapitulations of the same stretch of the sombre stream, suggests the monotony of Charon's task as Ferryman. The words 'bitter boating' seemed also to echo his mocking speech. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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IV/2 One of the many heads from Canto III/1 was selected and vastly enlarged to represent Homer. The epic range of his poetry (known to Dante only by repute) is indicated by various improvised scenes of a pastoral, military, nautical or Elysian character, including some obvious references to the Iliad (e. g. the Trojan Horse which is referred to in Canto XXX) and the Odyssey (e. g. the boat of Ulysses which plays such an important part in Canto XXVII). The colour chosen (in the original version) as a screened overprinting of the black and white etching echoes the red found on the pottery of Ancient Greece which so often depicts Homeric scenes. The stylised mask of Homer reappears in Canto XXVI/2 broken into pieces. As in the picture of Virgil in his Study (Canto II/1), and for the same reason, we see only one half of the sun. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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IV/4 This image equates the allegorical leopard of Canto I, the first of the three beasts, with CARO (cf. Canto 1/2) and with the vices of the flesh, and serves to announce the beginning of the first section of Hell proper which is devoted to the sins of luxury. The 'high hopes' that Dante entertained once of the life of pleasure are indicated by an echo of the sun-cloaked hill. The leopard is once again referred to only by his coat so reminding the reader that the first section of Hell is reserved for the superficial sins of appetite and self-indulgence. The other major sections of Inferno are also prefaced by images of the appropriate animals; the sins of the lion (Canto XXVII) and the sins of the wolf (Cantos XVIII and XXXIV). -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Canto IX/1 The theatricality of the Furies' appearance is emphasised by the likening of the crenellations to footlights. As in Canto VII/1 this derives from a minute original drawing. Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone represent as well as an anti-Trinity, a parody of the three Graces and the three Celestial Ladies who have pity on Dante as Virgil explains in Canto II. The irony of the choice of these names for the various printing branches of Editions Alecto where, by fire, my own way ahead in the making of this book was barred seems, at least at this distance of time, quite elegant. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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IX/2 Nine, the trine of trines and the magical number of Beatrice, the number that is the leading note so to speak of the mystical ten, has a special significance for Dante. The book is permeated with threeness and in this the ninth of the 99+1 Cantos of the Comedy as a whole and of the 33+1 Cantos of Inferno (it seems that Dante thought of the first Canto as an introduction to the Comedy) the poet chooses characteristically to point out the veiled and cryptic nature of his text. The form of the image as well as reflecting the style of some of my own notebooks for this project, echoes in its palimpsestic character the overlaying and interconnectedness of systems in Dante's whole oeuvre. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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IX/3 The arrival of the angelic messenger, since Dante has warned us to be on our guard for cryptic allegory, can be interpreted as a veiled reference to the Second Coming: hence by a parallel process of allegory the NO ENTRY sign (that made up the doors of Dis in CantoVIII/4) now opens to reveal the figure of Christ bearing a wand. The band of the traffic sign is now the bar of the Cross. The figure of Christ amidst the swirling vapours is that of the much disputed Shroud, an image rather like the spurious `death mask' of Dante which has nonetheless a compelling authority. The face on the Turin Shroud is quoted for the first time: it appears three times in the course of the book, in the initial illustration of Canto XVII and in the last Canto where it has a curious role in the portrayal of Satan. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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IX/4 This was the only stone lithograph in the original book where each animal was realised through a different process, the lion being drawn and scratched on stubborn stone. Two kinds of lion appear. At the top is the heraldic English lion (since this beast is sometimes referred to in heraldry as the Leopard of England it also serves to make the transition between this group of sins and the last) taken from an early version of the arms of England; at the bottom taken from an illustration in a wildlife magazine is an unequivocally confronting lion seen as if approaching yet seemingly imprisoned in the inflexibility of pride. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Canto V/1 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 of 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. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.