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XXVIII/4 Bertran de Born holds high his severed head in the midst of fractured wreckage of an imposing edifice, a house divided. Haunting this picture are my memories of houses ripped open by the Blitz. The structure is collaged from fragments illustrating many different kinds of building belonging to different social orders (the Schism of Class via palace and tenement) as well as places of worship of various kinds indicating religious factionalism. The smashing of what was once a unity is asserted by the identical pillars on either side of the riven entranceway. The text echoes Dante's image of the head held like a lamp to underline the implication that Bertran, a poet, should have illuminated the world with his intellect and eloquence instead of bringing it into deeper darkness. There is also a reminiscence in the image as a whole of the final vision of the Fall of the House of Usher. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Canto XXX/1 Clarity, reason and judgement were represented in Canto XI by a head (selected from Canto III/1) shown against a graph to signify Aristotle and his systems of classification. Here, to represent madness, head and graph are cut up and the fragments scrambled and superimposed, all falling to the bottom of the image area. As Homer's mask is broken and elevated in Canto XXVI so Aristotle's is here debased by the flight from reason of the fraudulent. In terms of colour the graph has now become more real as it registers the lowest of this group of categories, mad bestiality. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XXX/2 Within the crags and boulders of this Bolgia we find the forger Master Adam who falsified the coinage of Florence. A dropsical wreck, his vast middle makes his legs useless, and only one arm retains its strength. The hint of red recalls Master Adam's death by fire at the stake. Behind him Gianni Schicchi and Myrrha go on their endless rabid chase into the gloom, in search of souls to bite. The figures and the landscape in this, almost the most literal of the book's images, are concocted from Dore's illustrations to the Inferno. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XXX/3 The coins of Florence which were becoming an international currency (hence the Florins of Britain and Holland) showed the emblematic lily on one side and the figure of John the Baptist on the other (cf. Canto XIII/4). These were the coins that Master Adam falsified, by the addition of a percentage of dross to the metal (thus in his punishment he himself becomes swollen with waste matter). The progressive degradation of the coin in his hands is shown here by progressively more inaccurate pressings (of a rubber stamp that I had made of the coin) into the soft ground of the original plate, themselves progressively more crudely bitten. The image of the coin also rotates as one reads downwards through the image until one reaches the final punning text. The stamping on the plate seemed to have an appropriate relationship with coining and various metallic colours were used in the original printing. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XXX/4 The cartoon format is reverted to (cf. Canto XXII/l) for the almost slapstick dialogue between Sinon and Master Adam the vulgarity of which is such that Virgil reproaches Dante for listening to it. Abuse has to be teased out of Mallock's text, but it can be found. The odd emphasis provided by the capital letters was gained by the use of the publisher's catalogue at the end of A Human Document. `Suboroff is the name of one of their authors, though in this context it seems to have a different sort of meaning -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Canto XXXI/1 In a series of drawings called Letters from a Cranes kin Bag I explored what might be called primordial letter-forms (it was in a craneskin bag that Hermes carried the elements of written language, for cranes seem in their skeins of flight to spell out letters in the sky). Here the same forms do double duty in describing the language of Nimrod, architect of the Tower of Babel (whose tongue speaks gibberish now) and the unified language of the world that his vainglorious scheme brought to an end. The same basic lithograph represented, in Canto V11/2, the incoherent speech of Plutus, though there it was partially concealed by overlay. The colours relate to rock paintings I studied in the Kalahari from which these forms derived: they also have a hint of earth-based building materials for it was Nimrod's folly to try and make the earth stretch to Heaven. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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XXXI/2 Over a huge gap in time Dante foresees the now frighteningly realised possibility of monstrous power allied to intelligence. Nature he observes is sensible to have made its most powerful and hugest creatures without the guile to make use of their destructive potential. Here the dreaming boy (an innocent echo of the boy in Canto XXVII/1) sees looming up in his future a brutal force whose actions could be malignly controlled by artificial intelligence. The microchip which here stands for the monster's face and brain was one of the first ever illustrated (in the Scientific American which I subscribed to in the sixties). Reason, Faith and Hope are eclipsed and Culture is destroyed as vultures fly ahead to feed off the open book. The rest of the collage is from fragments of the Boy's Own Paper. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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.