Scope and Contents XXXI/3 Once again the emblematic nature of Dante's vision leads naturally to an image borrowed from the cinema which has re-realised our archetypes so well in this century, and which has so effectively dreamed for us our dreams. As the interior text puts it, 'in The New World, strange sort of parallel'. As Dante imagines his monsters in proportion to the tallest buildings of his time (towered cities like San Gemignano still provide a fragmentary glimpse of what Florence must have looked like "” cf. Canto XXVIII/1) so the makers of King Kong used the skyscrapers of New York as a measure of their monster, at least in the publicity (from which this image is taken) where King Kong seems to tower above the Manhattan skyline, buildings which in fact he shins up in the actual film. The figure of Fay Wray is doctored to make an apparent pair of figures alluding to the similarly accomplished carrying up of the two poets in the hand of Antaeus. The background colour refers of course to the...

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XXXI/4 The Tarot is again invoked with a slightly modified version of the Torre card (the word occurs five times in the Canto). This card, dealing as it does with the fate of vanity and ambition, is paired with a partly concealed Giustizia to indicate God's vengeance on the Giant's pride and arrogance. Another yet more concealed card contains a reminiscence of the letter-forms of the frontispiece (again a fictitious card as in Le Stelle of XX/1). The sun, placed directly in front of the sword of Giustizia, recalls Jupiter's revenge on Capaneus (who also, in Thebes, fell from a battlemented wall). The two figures of course can be taken to represent Dante and Virgil in their voluntary fall through Hell. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Canto XXXII/ 1 From the original cast-list etching of heads (III/1) a thousand and one have been taken (a thousand is used by Dante to signify any large uncountable number, perhaps as we today, after inflation, use a million). For the original printing, a new plate was made of these excerpted masks and a crumpled Chinese take-away container was used to simulate in the etching's soft ground the cracking of the ice in which the heads down here are buried. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XXXII/2 Continuing the mood of recycling and recapitulation that dominates the latter part of the book and hoping to make it clear in the process that the images, however various, do occupy a unified field I here reworked a picture from an earlier suite of prints called A Walk to the Studio which catalogued in order all the stop-cock box-lids (for such is their proper name) that lay beneath my feet as I walked from my home to the studio. They have always represented to me a kind of memento mori, announcing death with their lugubrious colour and skull-like shape (often with features reinforced by the action of time; the growth of weeds, the spots of tar and paint). Thus these heads that I walked on become the heads of souls, fixed in the ice (here superimposed in the same method as the previous image), that are trodden upon by Dante in this circle -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XXXII/3 `Caina's depth', as Dante tells us in Canto V, holds the murderer of Paolo and Francesca (Gianciotto Malatesta); when we arrive theres however, he is not mentioned. As a reminder that their story encompasses via its participants the whole of Hell, the murder is recapitulated here: this also points to the re-echo of 'Eve' in the next Canto. Here in the lowest Hell love is dead: and here lies the legitimate lover who killed love. Muybridge might also have found his way down here and therefore it is doubly right that his doves AloNna Ten Ileat btoken and separated and. subject to scrambled photographic processes. With the lurid ghosts of the kinsfolk/lovers on his mind, and their blood on his hands, Gianciotto tumbles down. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Canto XXXIII/1 The recapitulations that accumulate as this first part of Dante's trilogy draws to an end were often provoked by panic measures. Mistakes occurring at the very outset of the original book had to be pressed into service since the papermaking had been done and no more could be obtained. Thus I found myself with a whole set of spare versions of the image of the Dark Wood that opens the work; it seemed appropriate to try and use them at the end. Hell is frequently imaged as a prison throughout the poem; it is the prison within the prison of man's own error. This picture acts as a kind of condemned cell before the final release into the void of Evil Absolute which follows. Here, imprisoned, man looks out onto the claustrophobic imprisonment of his own mental state. This gaol is now imprisoned within the Book for a double eternity of the infamy that the inhabitants of Lower Hell so fear. As Ugolino betrayed his city by ceding fortresses to the enemy he is mewed up with his...

Scope and Contents XXXIII/2 One of Dante's most appalling images isobf the souls so hell-bent in life that they are pre-condemned and inhabit its deepest regions before their bodily death, while dark spirits inhabit their earthly frames to take them through the motions of the world's business. The two figures are (as the pair of loving figures in Canto XXIII/2) quoted from Eth Deutsches Requiem (cf. Works/Texts P. 150). They seemed to me to epitomise, as they strode across the postcards of Frankfurt and Dusseldorf (from which they are perhaps unfairly taken to this grim eternity), the ruthless businessman who would trade souls for gain. Each is shown here twice to echo their dual locations of body and spirit. One strides down to Hell with the same determination and urgency as he is seen striding towards his appointment: the other hurries towards his task, a black spirit already occupying his heart: meanwhile in the Underworld he is fixed in the ice that matches his unyieldingly frozen heart....

Scope and Contents XXXIII/3 The first personaliiies we meet in hell are Paolo and Francesca. Francesca's is the first voice we hear and she is the only woman from among Hell's denizens who speaks at all. She can thus, as has been pointed out in the notes to Canto V, be taken to stand for Eve, the primal sinner, whose child Cain gives his name to the region we have just passed through. Thus the first and last couples we meet are locked together, the one in love and the other in hate. In both cases only one of the pair speaks to tell a story which might elicit pity. The shadow of Eve is therefore thrown from a moon-like enlargement in negative of her name, from, as it were, the beginning to the end of Hell, set forever in a sky of dark stars. The shadow comes to rest on the coupled skulls of Ruggiero and Ugolino, which are themselves merely tilted and joined adaptations of the heads (after Michelangelo's Adam and Eve) of Paolo and Francesca from Canto V/4. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth...

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Canto XXXIV/1 One of the fears that any illustrator of Dante has is how to cope with his final apocalyptic monster, the three-headed Prince of Darkness in all his black grandeur. As so often the problem by accident presented its own solution. While I was working on Canto XVII/1 and fitting together the transparencies of the Turin Shroud head of Christ, I chanced to turn one of the negatives upside-down and saw in the image a weird physiognomy, which although made out of the features of Jesus seemed to be the epitome of scowling evil. Since Satan is the pattern of the Antichrist and is said to retain in his face some residue of glory, this inverted negative of the holiest of faces seemed more than apposite. Repeated thrice as the last travesty of the Trinity the undoctored features do the work. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents XXXIV/2 The description of the poets' emergence from the body of Hell has an anatomical character and features hints of ingestion, defecation, ejaculation and birth. As mentioned in the notes to Dante in his Study, the frontispiece of the book, any penetration into the Underworld is an image of a rape of Mother Earth. The pilgrims enter through a bushy orifice into a great enclosure: they progress through tracts and ducts and chambers in which the Humours and the Elements have their place and, in which blood and tears form canals and rivers and cataradis. Eventually, they emerge through a narrow channel, released into the open air from their first purging and ready to face the Mountain of Redemption that is denied to the world's pilgrim without some equivalent of this process of rebirth. Outside this abbreviated anatomy (reminding us that the genitals of Satan are exactly at the Earth's centre) we see the pilgrims in various orientations, to indicate their change of hemisphere as...

Scope and Contents XXXIV/3 As with Canto XXXIII/1, an early error was pressed into late service with advantage. In the original edition, the lithograph of Canto 1/2 shows the three beasts which give the identity to the main divisions of sin and therefore act as the initial emblems of the three levels of Hell. A whole edition of this lithograph was originally printed on the wrong side of the paper and the job had to be done again. Since they represent in this heraldic form the announcements of the depths to come it seemed pertinent to recapitulate them as the banners (their already pennant-like form already hinted at such a use) that precede Satan. The Canto starts with the Latin, in a parody of a VIth Century Holy Week hymn, VEXILLA REGIS PRODEUNT INFERNO. Wanting to leave this as it stood I felt obliged to give a translation somewhere, originally intending to make it the second line. Put over the pennants however, the words serve a double function of translating the text, and, by a gradual and...

Scope and Contents XXXIV/4 Paradoxically, of all the images used (and there were many false starts and rejects) this was the first to be drawn when preparing the initial artwork for the version started in 1978. It had escaped the fire that engulfed all the early studies by having been kept at home (since it would not have been needed until towards the end of the printing). Up to the reworking in 1983, it consisted only of the interior text and some of the stars with a blank in the middle intended for a handwritten section of Dante's text: this has now been replaced by a schematised shape which combines the shape of the book with a stylised world/hell/purgatory configuration containing a recapitulation of the principal images in the work, using a collage constructed from many of the plates. Below is a much less severely stylised book, opening in imitation of the rays of the sun. The binding imitates the standard binding of the Inferno, with some artistic license used in the representation of the...

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Castello: This print doesn't appear to be illustrated in the book Dante's Inferno. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents 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...

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This heralds the use throughout the book of a verbal commentary made up of treated fragments of the Victorian Novel A Human Document by W. H. Mallock, which else forms the basis of A Humument (Thames and Hudson 1980). Phillips comments: Having once boasted that Mallock's turgid text was an inexhaustible mine I here put it to its sternest test, to parallel the visual commentary of the plates with verbal glosses that might act as an alternative line of markers as the reader follows Dante's journey. I have been using Mallock's book now for twenty years; another twenty or so and we both might make it to Paradise. The image here presents a marbled world (the world as book) with a missing segment to indicate the hollowed cone of hell, here oriented sideways to act as an arrow pointing into the book. In Taoist cosmology Ch'i, the moving spirit of the universe, is expressed in art by marbling. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This suite of stage proofs for the title page was done for the deluxe limited edition of the book; a different title page was utilized for the trade edition published by Thames and Hudson. It includes stages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8. The firsr five are printed on texts of Phillips translations of the Inferno. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This is a review of the Tuttles' books exhibited at the New York Public Library. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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A love story of two fish-like creatures swimming against the current. The design features water-like marbled paper and a small red cellophane fish on a string. The pages of the central small book turn in a wave-like fashion. This book is enclosed in the slipcase with Dreamfish -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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A love story of two fish-like creatures swimming against the current. The design features water-like marbled paper and a small red cellophane fish on a string. The pages of the central small book turn in a wave-like fashion. This book is enclosed in the slipcase with Dreamfish -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.