This consists of a stage 1 proof and stage 2 proof (the final print) for the frontispiece of the deluxe limited edition of the book; it also served as the illustration for the dust jacket of the trade edition published by Thames and Hudson. The Stage 1 proof indicated that the image was the Editions Electo version. Phillips comments are as follows: This print in the original edition is a twenty-seven colour screenprint and is loosely based on a small reproduction of a painting attributed (equally loosely I think) to Signorelli. I have departed from this source in almost all respects and have introduced a back window which looks out on a quasi-metaphysical landscape that includes a rocky outcrop (derived from a nude photograph in an erotic magazine called in Depth') in front of which stands a cypress tree; a traditional reference to death but here also in form and position relating to a phallus. The juxtaposition recalls the idea (cf. Canto XXXIV/3) that any visit to the underworld is a rape of Mother Earth, whose hairy entranceway within this landscape is the Selva Oscura (cf. Canto Ill ). Also present, and rising out of the sea, is the Mountain of Purgatory, forming as it were an ancillary breast to the rocky reclining figure, Purgatory being the place of spiritual nurture. The books at the right of the picture give a key and colour-index to the whole. They are titled AMOR, ROMA and MARO, each being an anagram of the other. MARO is of course P. Vergilius Maro, Dante's guide: to some extent he must represent Hell but he is here more significantly the Source. The colour links him with the sea (the resemblance of his name to mare, latin for the sea, is the basis for one of Dante's puns), and the inkwell, a metaphor for the source of Dante's poetic skill. ROMA, linked by colour to Mount Purgatory, represents the Empire/Church dichotomy that pervades Dante's political thought. This colour is found again in the word DUX (DVX) indicating the poet's preoccupation with the coming of a true leader who might unite Italy and open up a path to national (or, as it would have seemed then, to supranational) redemption: the locus classicus of this in the Inferno is the Veltro prophecy (cf. Canto 1/4) which is hinted at by the letter 'V' which he is pointing at in the book he is consulting and also in the book open before him. That Dante is envisaging himself as the fulfiller of his own prophecy is implied both by this connection and by the presence of the same colour in the border that surrounds his portrait in the book on which his hand rests. The book that the poet is looking at (or beyond) is called AMOR, the book of the paradise of Divine Love; his whole attitude and aspiration is inclined towards this (his rooted finger however being also connected to worldly ambition) and to the Cross of the same colour on the wall behind him. One, irony in this set of visual correspondences is that, if Dante is looking towards his own past (as he does fictionally in the poem) the 'V' in the book of love could be taken as referring to Canto V of this work which deals with fleshly and concupiscent love (of which the poet was certainly not innocent in his gaudy youth). The left hand page of the open book contains the whole picture repeated at an angle and in more brilliant, variegated colour: this asserts that the artist or poet (a muted and bloodless figure) passes completely into his work and leaves, perhaps even in his life, a mere husk behind. The pictograms on the facing page hint at the hermetic nature of Dante's texts with their elusive allegorical and anagogical meanings. Dante's physiognomy is based on the traditional received image of a hatchet-faced ascetic that comes down to us, largely by a kind of visual word of mouth, via the probably spurious death-mask in Florence, the Torrigiano bust in Naples and the paintings of Raphael and Botticelli. The hands are my own and drawn from life though adapted to the geometrical dictates of the painting. All the above might be described as the iconographic grid of the image: this in turn is kept in a harmony of two-dimensional relationships by an involved mathematical grid (used in the original pencil study for the picture) based on the Golden Section and a secondary grid generated by the square of the shorter side. Every point of junction and origin and the limits of every feature in the linear drawings occur at a confluence of the web of lines generated by such a grid and derived from these canonic proportions. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.