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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.

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XIII/3 The blinded and battered head of Pier del Vigne is yet another from the 'cast list' which forms the initial illustration to Canto III. The bars indicate the prison against whose walls he dashed out his brains and that other prison in which he is now fixed as a shade. The same head (ghosted in negative) is formed by the lettering of the Wood of Suicides. In these words he is now enmeshed as he once was in the verbal intrigues and intricacies of court life. This element of wordplay continues in the ironic quotation in negative of the bar of the No Entry sign from Canto VIII which here stands for the courtier's (double) blindness and includes a distant reference to the EXIT euthanasia movement. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents XIII/4 The original drawing of the Veltro (cf. Canto 1/3) was, for the original etching of this picture, made into a rubber stamp in order to indicate the pack of hounds that pursue Lano and Jacopo. Perhaps in this there is some hint that any such King/Saviour as Dante hopes for would inevitably abuse his own power with a rubber-stamping bureaucracy and police to flush out dissidents with dogs. The stamp was pressed into a soft etching-ground with deliberate slitherings to represent the hounds in motion. In an echo of the wood-graining of the preceding image we see a representation of Mars (copied from a 19th Century book on astronomy) and the coin of Florence (the original of our florin) which will reappear in Canto XXXII/2. These recall the abandonment of Mars as the city deity and its adoption of the 'Baptist' (at least in the form of money) i. e. the old civic virtues replaced by greed for gold. The bush below represents the final anonymous speaker and its scattered leaves...

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Canto XIV/1 A dance of frantic hands drives off the falling flames. These particular balletic examples were adapted from various posed hands in La Mode Illustree, the nineteenth century equivalent of Vogue. The vertical lines repeat the rain motif of VI/1 and 4, and indicate the parallel monotony and relentlessness of the fire in this Canto and the rain that falls on the gluttonous. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents XIV/4 The two mountains that frame this Canto, Mount Etna (Mongibello) at the beginning and the Cretan Mount Ida at the end, give it a special symmetry and they are thus brought together here. The first is pictured as a male mountain ejaculating fire, housing as it does the forge of Vulcan with its weaponry of vengeance (used by Jupiter; hence the passing of the violence into the skies above). The second is, as befits its name, cast as a female mountain in the shape of a breast to indicate its use by Rhea (Cybele) as the place of nurture for her son (Jupiter again). It contains the statue of the Old Man of Crete here represented as schematised artifacts in general (Dante's detailed description renders visual corroboration unnecessary) with obvious Classical overtones etc. which in turn parallel the mixture of sources for the image (Dante, Ovid, the Bible, Science Fiction etc.). Also indicated are the pyramids of Egypt on which the statue turns its back while it faces Rome (here...

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Canto XIX/1 Popes are not uncommon in Dante's Hell and they are mostly clustered here, stuffed upside down and one on top of another. The papal arms stand for all these simoniac Popes and they are seen much degraded by the process of etching and re-etching a line drawing so that it begins to disintegrate. The version of the papal arms used for this was itself doctored by the removal of one of the two keys, i. e. the keys to Heaven and Hell that the Pope possesses. Thus these Popes that have misused their high office have forfeited the key to Heaven. Seen upside down the tassels now represent their feet aflame with a parody of anointment. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.