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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.

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V/2 The judgement of Minos is represented as already having taken place within the sinner's head. Dante himself, certainly in his earlier years, was known to be a philanderer and it is his own skull (taken from a drawing made by a Princeton scholar at the time of the exhumation of the poet's bones in the 1920's) that I have used here, as if to show him self condemned. Dante revisits carnal scenes of his youth perhaps, as the tail of Minos coils within his mind and winds itself around every remembered coupling. The same skull outline also appears in Canto VIII/2. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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V/3 Via a succession of three bird images Dante gradually isolates his chosen representatives of carnal sin, Paolo and Francesca. The initial flock of starlings, the straggling line of cranes come from varying sources; the starlings from an RSPB Journal, the cranes from a travel article in a Sunday Times Colour Supplement. The doves 'with wings held high and motionless' are taken appropriately from Muybridge's Animals in Motion and are the first two of seven suspended movements in a single flap of a pigeon's wings. The fact that they are one and the same bird seemed particularly apposite as an epitome of the idea of 'one flesh'. The colours are improvised from the original black and white photos. Muybridge's step-motion photographs are also the source of the figure in XV/4 which provides another link (cf. note to Canto V/1) to that canto. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents V/4 It is no accident that in Hell proper Francesca is the first person to speak or that she is the only woman that speaks to the pilgrims throughout their visit to the underworld. Thus it is that Dante implies that she represents the first of all the sinners, Eve, though he never mentions her by name. Francesca's story also contains cunning parallels with the episode of the Temptation if one thinks of Gallehault as the Serpent acting upon the primal innocents. Sometime in 1978, the TLS reproduced the whole of the Sistine ceiling as a black and white line drawing and it is from that this quotation from Michelangelo of the figures of Adam and Eve is taken, the remagnification lending a suitably distancing crudeness to the scene. The moments of Temptation and Expulsion are combined against the background whirlwind of copulating lovers that make up Dido's flock. The word 'Eve' which here appears inside an apple is itself to be found magnified in Canto XXXIII to accompany the re-use of...

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Canto VI/1 Perpetually, and under perpetual rain the gluttons consume their own squalor in a parody of their innately dismal earthly self indulgence. They fall, like rain into a swamp, and become indistinguishable from one another. This vision of Dante is summed up in the first and last pictures of the canto. Here an identical pig is repeated amidst the falling rain. The initial comic effect is reduced by the fact that the pig here pictured is itself already cut and marked for consumption: it comes from a butcher's diagram in a Victorian recipe book. This association is underlined in the third illustration. The repetition of the animal here of course refers to the repetitive monotony of both the sin and its punishment. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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VI/2 Cerberus, the legendary three-headed dog, is the first of many perversions of the Trinity that mark like signposts the recesses of Dante's vast Theatre of Memory. Here in Canto VI we also have the first of many vilificatory references to Florence (Dante described himself as a Florentine by birth but not in character) and here the Florentine lily, also an image of the Trinity, appears mixed into the figure of Cerberus. This central picture is surrounded by spattered mud to indicate Virgil's parodied feeding of Cerberus with mud-pies (in the Aeneid the beast fares better with honeyed cakes). Dante in his condemnation of Florence is perhaps also involved in mudslinging. In the original version these blobs were made by dropping bombs of cotton wool soaked in sugar water on to a prepared etching plate and printed by the sugarlift process. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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VI/3 While I was preparing this Canto, Trivier Marc, a Belgian photographer who had photographed me a year earlier, asked for another session. When he arrived, I asked him what he had been doing recently. He opened a portfolio, and on top of the pile of pictures that he had taken at an abattoir was this image of a pig which solved the problem of this particular illustration with its brutal frontality (rearality) and its repetition of the pig as the eater to be eaten in this Canto's first illustration: it also did the job of focussing on one particular glutton and is seen in the position one imagines Ciacco to be in when he keels over. Even the atmosphere, with the steam rising as if from the fetid swamp of sodden souls, seems appropriate, and the dimly seen figure could well pass for Dante the onlooker. M. Marc kindly gave me permision to use the photo which appears here as the least doctored image in the book. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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VI/4 Every new illustrator of Dante has somehow to exorcise the ghost of Gustave Dore. Here the cold compress of bodies beneath the monotonously falling rain, hail and snow is a collage of fragments of figures taken from a cheap reprint of Dore's version of the Inferno using about a hundred different bits of the writhing people that it so liberally provides. The weather element is an adaptation of the first attempt to make the first image of the Canto (initially pigless). -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Canto VII/1 The image of the Wheel of Fortune was based on a tiny drawing (less than an inch high) that I made in the first notebook of 1977. The drawing was blown up to the present size and both positives and negatives were used as the basis of the image. The adapted South African banknote exists as an autonomous print made in that Republic in 1975. The slogan with which it is overprinted is in Afrikaans: I invented it in response to the many notices I saw throughout South Africa saying 'Reserved for Whites' (Slegs vir Blankes) and had a rubber-stamp made of it with which I overprinted the banknotes that passed through my hands `Slegs vir Almal' (`Reserved for Everybody'). The face appearing on the note is tinted brown to indicate my hope that the wheel of fortune will turn eventually so that the black population will not always be, as they are here, at the bottom, a hope reinforced by Virgil's description of the workings of Fate. The idea reappears in Canto XXVIII/3. -- Source of...

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VII/2 Round their eternal circle misers and spendthrifts roll their huge stones crying 'Why Spend' and 'Why Save'. To repeat the slogan motif their cries have become the stones themselves. In order to reflect the dim greyness that Virgil states is the quality given these sinners by their squalid lives the original version is printed in a mixture of blind intaglio and barely perceptible ink, impossible to reproduce. The image is entirely reworked for this edition, with the addition of Italian banknote fragments. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.