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VII/3 Based on the opening utterance of the Canto, the semi-gibberish cackled by Plutus, this verbal palimpsest refers forwardS in two ways; to further on in the Inferno where the same configurations of nonsense letters represent the incomprehensible sounds made by Nimrod (Babel's builder, King of Gibberish) in Canto XXXI/1, and to our own time when James Joyce acknowledged this passage as a high licence for his own experiments in language. The centre of the picture features a fragment from a TLS review which testifies to this. The stencilled text in turn plays with Plutus' words in the manner of Duchamp's patron, Walter Arensberg, whose Cryptography of Dante is a bewildering farrago of false wordtrails pursued with earnest lunacy. Thus we have gibberish begotten by gibberish overlaying a kind of primal gibberish with the studious Joyce at the eye of it all. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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VII/4 The theme of language in distortion reflects once again the twisting of values that dominates the canto. By accident Dante's own text is present in this plate which is reworked from part of the earliest version of the illustrations when it was my intention to write out the whole of the Italian text by hand within the picture area. Here words are defeated by pain and stand for the suffering of their speakers. These are the sullen syllables of the morose who sing their miserable psalm as if in bubbles and eddies round a drain. Even the interior text from A Human Document has become clogged towards unintelligibility. Thus the Canto begins and ends with incoherence. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Canto VIII/1 As Malebolge can be said to be Dante's Infernal characterisation of Rome (cf. Canto XVIII/3) so Dis, the iron red fortified city, flame-containing and flame-consumed, stands in the scheme of the underworld for Florence. One gets the impression that the poet has consigned his whole city like a Gomorrah into Hell. The emblematic lily is here seen in its original Golden Section outline engulfed by licking tongues of flame that seem to echo and parody its own flame-like divisions. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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VIII/2 Dante wavers between 'yes' and 'no'. The same drawing of his skull as was used in Canto V/1 here contains the ticks and crosses of his dilemma. The form of the skull is echoed by question marks. Other hints of the poet's face float indecisively around: these are taken from the series of drawings mentioned in the note to Canto IV/2. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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VIII/3 Dante glories in the humiliation of Filippo Argenti who tries to cling to the side of his boat. This episode is of course the subject of Delacroix' magnificent painting from which it was difficult to resist the temptation to quote. The emerging (or sinking) head is adapted from the bathers of Canto XII/1 and, as in other uses of these figures which derive from seaside postcard fragments (cf. Canto XXII/1 and Canto XVIII/3), there is an ironic mockery of baptism implied: In that sense this image serves as a pre-echo of many such immersions (cf. Canto XIX). The four horseshoes refer to the arrogance of Argenti who earned his nickname from the vainglorious habit of having his horse shod with silver. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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VIII/4 The poets' journey receives its first major check at the forbidding entrance to the city of Dis. This barring of the way ahead is tersely rendered by the instantly recognisable NO ENTRY sign (in which as will be seen lurks another function). The crosses emphasise the denial and echo those of the second illustration to this Canto. Above the sign are indications of the three Furies dripping blood. The sign was copied in colour and proportion in a street-sign climbing expedition by Nick Tite. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Canto X/1 The tombs of the Epicureans are here seen as the very books in which, denying the afterlife, they signed and sealed their future doom. The two best-known Epicurean tags are prominently featured, Horace's Carpe diem and its English equivalent 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. . .' The latter made the subsidiary quotation from `Citizen Kane' (Rosebud. . .) an irresistible echo. Other authors are featured as well as some light hearted personal references; one page, with the words 'Surprise Surprise . . .' written on it stands for a joke greeting to new Epicurean arrivals, who, having just died in a confident disbelief in the immortality of the soul, awake to find themselves in an eternity of painful survival. Books can dig a grave, as Strabo, Polystratus, etc. find out. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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X/2 This is the first of many transformations of the Florentine lily. Here it is cut up and reassembled to make a warlike emblem reminiscent of a knight on horseback (the design was also meant to serve as a device for a notebook binding). Obscuring this are the dates of three battle landmarks in that history of bloody feuds related by Farinata. 1251 (MCCLI) is especially significant as the date at which, in celebration of shed blood, the old white emblem of the lily was changed to red. This same cut up version is repeated in Canto XXVIII/2 where its outline can be more clearly seen -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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X/3 The shut book, which itself extends the theme of the opening illustration, represents the answer to Dante's question on the perception of time by the inhabitants of Hell. Time, for them, diminishes towards the present and their awareness of events will cease altogether at the Last Judgement which will mark the closing of the book of future time. All this is embodied here in the picture of a book drawn in exaggerated reverse perspective with human events lying as it were beyond it, shut and clasped as it is. The book features reinforcing imagery in the form of an eclipse, a handless watch, and the final letters of the alphabet (Z and Omega). The collage elements representing the medley of human activity come appropriately enough from old copies of the Illustrated London News. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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X/4 The presence of a British flag (quoted from a previous screenprint called Sixteen Appearances of the Union Jack which in turn quotes a postcard of this flag flying by the Thames) seems perhaps over-insistent in relation to the small mention that Britain gets in Dante's text. Perhaps it serves as a reminder that the same flag flew over many a scene of tyrranical conquest. Also, in a Hell which seems to be so crowded with Italians, there must after all be some British representatives, if only the odd errant cultural attaché. The lower part of the picture derives again from a postcard of bathers (ironically enough it is a scene from a Butlin's holiday camp) only slightly doctored to highlight the contrasting blond and black heads of Azzolino and Opizzo. The arc-like format is obscurely related to the -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Canto XI/1 As Dante-the-Poet (for both he and Dante-the-Pilgrim are present in the text) is allowed the illumination of hindsight so may the artist share the same license. Dante is one of the great recyclers of his own imagery and his output forms a unity of resonant recapitulation: he is (as most fiercely evidenced by the Convito) his own most detailed commentator. Thus his illustrator can with all the appropriateness rifle his own work for images and enrich the former instances with present use (cf. Cantos 111/3, XXVIII/ 1 etc.). The symbol chosen here to stand for the violent is quoted from a screenprint Emblemes of Violence from a series A Walk to the Studio. It shows holes knocked into pieces of corrugated iron (themselves much recycled) photographed at a local building site. Their resemblance to flared and rusted bullet holes brought back early memories of gangster-films seen as a child with my father, where bursts of gunfire caused such holes to appear spontaneously in doors...

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XI/2 The dry and somewhat sepulchral nature of worthy scholarship hangs about this image which depicts the tombstone of Anastasius. It is unfortunate that Dante, for whom the distinction of temporal and spiritual power was all important in his political theory, should have mixed up Pope Anastasius with the Emperor of the same name. I have tried to make the picture akin to a nineteenth century book-illustration of a classical inscription (the lettering was drawn up by Pella Erskine-Tulloch) overlaid by a sharp rap on the scholastic knuckles in the form of a brusque typewritten correction. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XI/3 As in the case of Homer in Canto IV one of the tiny heads from the initial image of Canto III is enlarged (almost X50) to represent the face of Aristotle. It is set upon a graph and contains a grid deriving from that graph in which the Aristotelian systematisation of morals which Virgil urges Dante to recall is mapped by variously shaded values. These in their turn degenerate in the lower region of the brain into more and more shapeless areas of illogicality. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XI/4 Still employing the emblem of violence mentioned in the note to the first of this Canto's illustrations, we move on to the representation of Art itself (of which this is of course a fragment). Virgil cites Aristotle to explain that Art is, as a child of Nature, a grandchild of the Lord. This lineage is explained via an upright triangle (the Trinity) atop a second, with a third image below, the last being more worked than the preceding two. The downward arrowed direction also serves (since this image ended the first volume of the original edition) to emphasise the continuing of the downward path along which Dante must guide us with his own art. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Canto XII/1 This frontispiece, culled from the seaside postcards mentioned in the note to Canto VIII/1, continues the parallel of the various immersions mentioned in the poem with Baptism: hence the use of a water image as source. The colour is here changed to indicate a baptism in blood (one remembers that such a blood baptism linked to human violence still survives in the 'blooding' of the first-time foxhunter). The same image is used as the initial illustration to Canto XXII where the baptism takes place in tar. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XII/2 The Minotaur, symbol of violence against Nature, is here shown taking his first shambling steps from the womb of his mother Pasiphae who recoils in horror at the offspring of her engineered coupling with the bull (the contrivance and artifice of the union is echoed in her own mechanised vagina). The picture of this scarce-formed creature is made up of about two hundred fragments of the Boy's Own Paper and the Illustrated London News. I have preferred to picture the beast as bull-headed rather than bull-bodied: it is not clear which version Dante himself preferred and both have a long history in iconography. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XII/3 Although Dante's description of the Minotaur is ambiguous, he leaves us in no doubt as to the form of the Centaurs. The three depicted here are constructed from fragments of an advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes (cf. 20 Sites n Years) and the border is an extended repeat of a design motif from a packet of Gitanes. The use of these two sources announces my own mode of violence to the self. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XII/4 The three arrows stand for the threefold journey of the poet. Dante-the-Pilgrim learns from Farinata what Dante-the-Poet already knows, i. e. that he is heading into exile, indicated here by the arrow pointing forwards towards the cancelled lilies. He is reminded by Virgil that he will eventually travel upwards towards his beloved Beatrice who will help him to understand his quest for life (the arrow which points above leads to Beatrice's name and her identification from 'Donne ch'avete. . .). The third direction indicated is of course the Pilgrim's continuing journey downwards through Hell. Thus the lowest arrow points towards the Seventh Circle where the lilies are transformed into flames. The idea of a multiple life-journey is universally applicable: here Dante seems to divide it into travel in time recollected, a journey in time imagined, and the moral continuum of life. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Canto XIII/1 The only other wood in the Inferno besides the Selva Oscura of the Opening Canto is this dismal and distorted echo, where we find the suicides, now turned into twisted trees and fed upon by Harpies. Perhaps Dante meant to indicate that one apparent, though of course illusory, way out of the 'Dark Wood' of life's crises is to kill oneself, and thus he makes the suicide perpetuate in his own person the tangle of the wood's confusion. This I have tried to show by remaking the original wood of words in reverse, darkened further by the colours of dead and decaying trees. Above it fly the Harpies represented by the crows painted by Van Gogh shortly before his own suicide; the birds he seemed to see as black harbingers of death. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XIII/2 The original lettering (Una Selva Oscura) reappears here again in reverse: only the outlines of the letters are shown in the colour of blood which has so to speak seeped through them from the rest of the image as if to indicate the narrow spurts of blood that form the words of the suicides hidden in the gnarled trees. A wood-grain like outline drawing appears on top hinting at faces and mouths. The interior text expresses Dante's unpreparedness for an actuality which yet he -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.