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.