Scope and Contents Canto XXIV/1 The mention of both snakes and ladders in this Canto and the discussion of transitory things at the mercy of chance and change which opens it, suggested, as life and man's haphazard progress must have suggested to the anonymous deviser of the game, Snakes and Ladders (with which I was so familiar as a child). When I looked in toyshops to find such a board they seemed to have so declined in quality of drawing that I started to look instead in junk shops for a model, eventually finding one in a London hotel on a Sunday at the 'Postcards and Ephemera Fair 1982.' It still seems to be a potent and edifying metaphor, more jumpy, episodic, and therefore more lifelike than the Wheel of Fortune. I adapted this version from the colour scheme of the above-mentioned board and increased the number of snakes, making some of them remove the 'player' from the board altogether. I also changed the proportions to fit my modular format and recast the numbers to make a magic rectangle more...

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XXIV/2 These four images of transience as exemplified by the elements reflect Dante's opening pastoral simile and Virgil's recapitulations of its meaning in both his change of mood and his exhortation to Dante to beware of slothfulness which produces the ephemeral life. Air, Fire, Snow and Water are illustrated from Boy's Own Paper fragments (Virgil's is a very BOP message here). Earth is only hinted at in the gritty mezzotint border. At the centre (from La Mode Illustree) are reminiscences of 'blankets and soft dawn'. In Dante's day (as throughout Europe until as late as the nineteenth century) Fame was an honourable goal that could be acknowledged without equivocation. The shapes of the compartments of the picture resemble those of playing cards as if to continue the imagery of chance. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XXIV/3 Dante alludes to the Phoenix in the mood of ancient knowledge and I have thus tried to make a page of some imagined manuscript in which such arcana might have been found. The phoenix has a special relevance to pages of this book in particular since the whole production was revived from its own ashes after the first year's work on the original had been destroyed in a fire at Editions Alecto in 1979. The range of Dante's sources, ancient and modern, oriental and occidental is present in the stylistic and calligraphic mixture of this page with its hieroglyphs, pseudo-oriental script, its Greek illuminated capital, its sequence of Phoenix pictures reminiscent of alchemical treatises, and its modern typographic fragment. The lidded box implies the union of ancient and Hermetic imagery with Christian thought, a feat of unification on Dante's part that outstrips Aquinas. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XXIV/4 As in Canto XVI/1 the original Golden Section Lily has been subject to computerised distortion. These are more extreme variants from the graphics computer at Leicester Polytechnic. They serve to represent, according to the misty prophecies of Vanni Fucci (nicknamed 'the Beast' and himself an extremist of the Black Guelph faction) the fates of the Black and White Guelph parties. The Whites suffer the greater distortion in the fall of their fortunes while the more recognisable Black lily seems to float higher. The original drawing was, so to speak, wrapped around itself in an imaginary space by the computer which made more possible the airborne aspect of the emblems as they participate in Vanni Fucci's strange shrouded meteorological predictions, so darkly turbulent. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents 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...

Scope and Contents XXIX/2 In the previous ditch, amongst the schismatics, Dante had failed (or perhaps had needed to fail) to see his father's first cousin Geri del Bello, who was the victim of a blood-feud murder by one of the Sacchetti family. Dante now recalls him: one wonders whether, had he seen him, his thoughts would have dwelt on schism as perpetrated and perpetuated by his own family. Under the obligation of Vendetta the poet feels guilt at not having himself avenged his relative's death. The quotation shows Dante (in Rime CIII/83) as one who largely believed that 'fine honour's gained extracting just revenge'. The plate for the original etching was scratched and scored by my own fingernails as the inhabitants of this Bolgia forever scratch themselves, for Vendetta is an ever open and self-replicating sore. The scratches themselves (though there is a hint of gore in the titling) are bloodless as are the spirits that are scratched and is Dante's Hamletesque failure to kill in vengeance. These...

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XXIX/3 The reappearance here of the walls of A Folly for Wisdom (cf. IV/1) now broken and reassembled in a topsy-turvy fashion heralds the representatives of Sienese folly often caricatured by Florentines as Dante does here by mentioning some typical spendthrift fools such as Niccolo who was said to have used costly and exotic cloves as the fuel with which he cooked pheasants. The castle walls in their state of disarray and the upside down text on the arms of Siena (copied from a black and white print I saw in a Venice shop window) indicate the reversal of values that Dante castigates. The broken structure now contains, instead of poets and sages, samples of stupidity and decadence half drawn from the imagination and half from memories of school and university contemporaries. The green triangle (cf. Canto IV/1 and XVI/4) is also requoted in irony. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents XXIX/4 The painter now reappears, regressed to childhood, his painting (still one of my own Union Jack pictures) becomes even more irrelevant as the Bomb destroys Hiroshima. Around him also explodes another catastrophe, this time of his own finances as he strives to make a book of unprecedented lavishness and as he drives himself deeper into stupendous debt. The bank statement is genuine (being my own) and the bank's name is thinly disguised by an anagrammatisation (though its symbol has appeared before in Canto XVII/2). Here the extravagance of the lunatic spenders of the Sienese Club is joined to the strange prodigality of artists. Cappochio who ends this Canto was reputed to have painted exquisite scenes from the life of Christ on his fingernails, only to lick them off when requested to show them to anyone he felt unworthy to see them. The freedom of the printing process allows one to recall the splendid redness of overdraft statements in my student years (I have had an...

Scope and Contents XXV/2 The gesture of 'figs' which is Vanni Fucci's parting blasphemy is still alive and well in many parts of the world. The sexual connotations come from a punishment imposed by Barbarossa on those who had humiliated his daughter: he made them suck a fig from the vagina of a she-mule. The special relevance to Pistoia is that the city had a high tower built topped by huge marble arms projecting in the direction of Florence and making this same gesture. Here I have paralleled the Italian sign with its rough English equivalent, the poking out of the tongue with its similar vulva associations. The head is, in outline, the mirror image of Vanni Fucci's fist: this hints at the transformation to come and seems to identify the whole personality with the gesture of derision, and also continues the mirroring aspect of the previous illustration. On a wall (perhaps of the aforementioned tower) behind appears a `poster' taken from the 'Sun' newspaper (c. 1980) showing a crude placard which...

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XXV/3 It is Ovid, the master of metamorphosis, whom Dante challenges to a stylistic dual, inviting the reader to witness his superior skill. Echoing once again the format of early book illustrations in keeping with the wealth of literary reference in the Canto, four quasi-Ovidian scenes surround a portrait of the poet (itself derived from various vague Roman likenesses). No precise events in Ovid's Metamorphoses are alluded to, though the original lithograph was itself achieved (using a series of transparencies of an original grisaille) by a process of metamorphosis. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XXV/4 The fragments of Laocoon that were used as the frontispiece of this Canto in an emblematic and formal way are here reassembled (as the reptilian elements in the text reassemble and change) to make a more organic figuration. The classical elements are rearranged to form a mannerist/romantic group, a transcription of the original energies of the sculpture. The colouring is intended to recall the muscular feats of Michelangelo's supermen and the sexual implications of the formal elements are given free reign as if to combine the themes of the preceding illustrations. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Canto XXVI/1 GODI FIORENZA, the opening cry of this canto is here writ large (very large in fact since the original drawing for the lettering is fifty inches high) and in sombre colours, to stress its irony. The only gleam of relief lies in the slight displacement of positive and negative plates which, so to speak, by deliberate error serves to outline the words which would otherwise be almost indistinguishable. A Florence which Dante castigates for its loss of honour and brightness is here characterised by a lily in bloodless grey. The coarseness of texture implies a slogan in the manner of wall graffiti (`Up Arsenal' etc.) -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XXVI/2 Among the flames which, in an extended image, he compares to fireflies, Dante spies out five Florentines in the perpetual dusk. Here in what heraldry would call a `field' of stylised fireflies I have placed five reduced versions of the computer-distorted lilies already used in Canto XXIV/4. These have been highlighted both by the suppression of the background mezzotint and their being encircled, as if in the telescopic sights of a gun, by target-shapes (combinations in fact of Letraset photo-registration marks) which pinpoint them as unerringly as does Dante's scorn. The number 5 is the page number of the Human Document text. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents XXVI/4 The sea of the preceding image is here twice present. In the original lithograph the general background derives from a combination of xeroxed positives and negatives upon which is superimposed a spiralled cut-up of the original positive for the preceding image. The circular form suggests the churn of waters that swallow the ship of Ulysses as well as the water-covered hemisphere that the mediaeval mind imagined. Out of this arises, as if in a dream inset, a glimpse of Mount Purgatory (the positive extrusion of Hell's negative drilling as explained later by Virgil). The inset vision is once again made from the sea and mountain fragments from the Boy's Own Paper: it appears framed and set apart, for it represents somehow an anomalous interpolation in the Matter of Hell, a sight forbidden to living man and unimaginable to the infernal damned. The interior text here appears in negative for the first time as such texts will do increasingly as the reversal of human values...

Scope and Contents Canto XXVII/1 As in the example given by Dante of the artificer of the Sicilian Bull, the devisers of guileful intricacy are finally and eternally trapped in their own machinations, becoming part of the schemes that were once part of themselves. The famous, rather cold-looking arrogant boy at the bottom left of the image seems to dream his Macchiavellian and megalomaniacal dreams and spins a mechanical web of devices. So Guido da Montefeltro spins his tale of dupes, stratagems and accomplices and we learn how he, the crafty, becomes in turn the dupe of a craftier Pope. The cast of any such tale is indicated here by faces which emerge from and disappear back into the mechanistic maze (they are easiest discerned with half-closed eyes; or appropriate suspicion). The collage is from the Boy's Own Paper (rich in impossible tasks of DIY engineering) and the Illustrated London News. Around the picture is a hand drawn frame of netting, to refer both to a tangled web of deceit and to hint...

Scope and Contents XXVII/2 The river of eloquence that encircles the Folly for Wisdom (cf. IV/1) is here quoted, starting in the top left hand corner in its original colour and progressively twisting itself into a cunning tongue of flame, to signify both Guido's misuse of his gifts of persuasive oratory and the form he takes on his final punishment. This is Eloquence without the Wisdom it is designed to frame. Dante's earlier view of Guido da Montefeltro (Convito IV. XXVIII. 8) is quoted beneath (as his own mistaken eloquence in describing Guido as 'our noblest Italian. . .'). Also quoted is a fragment of T. S. Eliot's 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' which refers to Guido's final servility before Authority and repays one of Eliot's many compliments to his favourite poet of the past; for the prefatory quotation to `Prufrock' is taken from this Canto where Guido says, 'If I believed my answer was addressed to one who might go back into the world this flame would stop vibrating and stand still. --...

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XXVII/3 In returning to Dante's running verbal vendetta against Pope Boniface VIII the initial illustration to Canto XIX is revisited. It tumbles now to emphasise the single key which indicates that this Pope at least can only make the dispensation of a long season in Hell, though he is seen here affording the impotent absolution that he gives to Guido. In the background the sign of blessing is seen parodied in a form reminiscent of the blasphemous gestures of Canto XXV/2. The image of Boniface comes from a drawing that I made in 1979 in the foyer of the Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, where a poster featured his equestrian statue. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents XXVII/4 The end of Guido's sad tale (in contrast to that of his son, related in Purgatorio, who repented in the very mouth of Hell) is of a long repentance negated by a single action. Here in his Franciscan robe we see him tumbling down after the black cherub had snatched him from St Francis himself (in a scene dominated once again by the eloquence of evil). Amongst the fallen angels are all the counterparts of the true Angelic Orders. The black Cherubim whose representative we meet here in the eighth Bolgia of the eighth circle are of the eighth order and represent the intellect. He is presented here as three Roman eights, black and twisted. St Francis, whose image Guido has tried to 'mirror', as indicated in the drawing, drifts back up without his dubious prize whereas Guido is pierced by pain in a parody of the Saint's stigmata, and his face is now concealed as he would wish his fate concealed on earth: it is at this point in the Inferno that the souls become less keen on having...

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XXVIII/2 By singular good fortune a professional anatomist of distinction was numbered amongst the subscribers to the original book and Dr. B. Moxham has supplied anatomical information (cf. also XXXIV/3) and, most invaluably, the pictures of a sectioned corpse that I have used here. That the split cadavers are themselves split intc separate photographs that here are brought together as a fairly ill-fitting mosaic is itself appropriate. The worst-sliced figure can be thought to represent Mahomet (that is, as Dante thought of him) who speaks while poised to depart. The image is made up out of nine photographs with (in the original assemblage) gouache additions -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents XXVIII/3 This picture, itself divided and split, brings together recapitulated themes from my past work. The Berlin Wall (already hinted at in Canto XVII/1) was the subject of two paintings done in 1973 (Berlin Wall with German Grass and Skies cf. Works/Texts pp. 186-9) and stands here for the divided city to make a parallel with the city of Florence seen in the upper inset panel. The view of mediaeval Florence is taken from a contemporary representation of the city; it is divided into two by a broken version of the emblematic lily itself segmented into black and white areas with the city's image further divided by a blue and white cross. The image thus conflates the divisions and subdivisions of Guelph and Ghibelline that sundered the city's peace throughout the Middle Ages. Black and White divisions are taken up in another guise via the recapitulation of a similar theme which occurs in a series of paintings made for an exhibition in South Africa in 1974/1975, most of which went...