Canto XXIX/1 Over a brooding landscape flies a figure representing the folly of false magic and all its claims. Some hint of the French myth of Leonardo da Vinci's flight links the theme to Dante's 'Apes of Nature' in the last line of this Canto where the poet seems to refer to certain kinds of artists who make outlandish claims or whose pretensions in their art are the equivalent of folly. The artist here seems to be disregarding both the technological marvel of the man in flight and, to judge by the work on his easel (a quotation from one of my own flag paintings of c. 1974), the splendour of the landscape around him. The figure which combines the Leonardesque intimations of mechanical flight with the false wings of Icarus seems to surge towards an unknown future in the necessary folly of risk without which art or science cannot advance. Perhaps though it is the mere fantasy of the artist as he works. The landscape, however, is solid enough and recalls the structure of the Bolgia itself. The collage elements come from the Boy's Own Paper with the addition of some fragments of aeronautical illustration kindly supplied by David Walker. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.