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Paradise Lost and the Visual Arts
By Roland Mushat Frye

"My thesis is that Milton's descriptions rely pervasively upon visual representations, and that his powers of description can neither be fully understood nor fully appreciated apart from the traditional iconography which he has transmuted into poetic forms."

IN Paradise Lost, John Milton was drawing upon many ancient traditions to create a sweeping epicview of human nature and destiny in a universe initiated and providentially preserved by God. The story he tells begins, chronologically, with the rebellion of Lucifer, the greatest of the angels who sought to usurp the place of the Almighty, continues through the expulsion into Hell of Lucifer and his angelic followers, describes the creation of the physical universe and of Adam and Eve, chronicles their fall and redemption of man, and carries the narrative through a synopic vision of human history to the Resurrection and the Last Judgment. For the most part, the scenes and characters of Paradise Lost are invisible to human sight, at least under present human conditions: Heaven and Hell, angels and devils. Adam and Eve, and the Garden in Eden are not accessible to our inspection, and there is no way in which we can appraise Milton's epic descriptions by comparing his verses with the persons and events themselves. For this reason, it is often said that Milton was describing the indescribable, and in one sense that judgment is of course sound.

But although he was describing the indescribable, Milton was in no sense describing the undescribed. The central characters, places, and events of his great epic had occupied the foreground of visual art in the western world for a millennium and a half before he was born. Milton's epic story coincided with a visual tradition which was to be seen throughout Europe: hundreds of examples of it were to be found even in the relative isolation of England, and it was preeminently to be encountered in Italy. Milton's year spent in Italy in 1638 and 1639 brought him into acquaintance and even close friendship with several important collectors of art and one of his closest friends (Carlo Dati) became a well-known authority on the history of Italian art. It was a standard feature of journeys to Italy in this time that English tourists should take a considerable interest in the art available in Italy, and a full analysis of the evidence will indicate that Milton was no exception.

A full analysis of these relationships

Roland Mushat Frye, a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY, is Professor of English literature, such as God, Man, and Satan (1960), Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (1963), and Perspectives on Man, delivered as the L. P. Stone Lectures in 1959. This present paper was originally read for a Symposium on John Milton and was published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 120. No. 4 (Aug. 4, 1976), pp. 233-244. The paper, with a few abbreviations, is reprinted with the permission of the APS. This discussion anticipates Dr. Frye's new, big book on Milton, to be published by Princeton University Press.

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will be provided when my book on Milton and the visual arts is published late this year or early next year. What I shall be doing in this paper is to summarize and exemplify a few of the findings contained now in that book manuscript of approximately a thousand pages, which analyzes in minute detail the relations between Milton's epic imagery and the traditional treatments of his subjects in art. My thesis is that Milton's descriptions rely pervasively upon visual representations, and that his powers of description can neither be fully understood nor fully appreciated apart from the traditional iconography which he has transmuted into poetic forms.

I

One eighteenth-century critic declared that Milton was at fault for "sensualizing our ideas of heaven to a degree that may have ill Effects" and that his conceptions of heaven were "every whit as sensual as a Mahometan's."¹ The so-called "absurdities" of the physical descriptions of angels and devils and the war between them might be traced to the influence of Homer, or might be attributed directly to Milton's own invention, but in either case they were regarded as deplorable elements of Paradise Lost. In our own time, Mark Van Doren finds the War in Heaven "outlandish," John Peter calls it "a fiasco" full of "monstrous curiosities" and "Disney-like panoramas," while William Empson stigmatizes it as "unusually stupid science-fiction ."²

FIG. 1. Fifth-century mosaic, Christ Separating the Sheep from the Goats, S. Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna (Alinari -Art Reference Bureau).

The critics who wrote to this effect would doubtless have been more pleased with the very early representations of Christian art, such as (fig. 1) a. mosaic from Ravenna of the early sixth century, which shows Christ in the act of judgment. The judgment here is symbolized by the separating of sheep and goats, and we see two angels standing on either side of the judging Christ.

FIG. 2. Late fifth or early sixth-century mosaic, Christus Victor, Chapel of the Archbishop, Ravenna (Alinari-Art Reference Bureau).

¹ John Shawcross, ed., Milton 1732-1801: The Critical Heritage (London, 1972), pp. 101- 103.
² Mark Van Doren, The Noble Voice: A Study of Ten Great Poems (New York, 1946), pp. 133-134; John Peter, A Critique of "Paradise Lost" (New York, 1960), pp. 76-78; William Empson, Milton's God (London, 1965), p. 54.

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The angel on Christ's right hand is a faithful angel; the angel on Christ's left hand appears just as beautiful as the faithful angel, and is distinguished only by the blue color of his clothing and halo. This "blue angel" was the Devil, and the application of blue marked the difference in early Christian art between a fallen and a faithful angel. We should also notice Christ as victor in a mosaic from Ravenna of about 500 A.D. (fig. 2). Here again we find a simplicity of vision and symbolism which would have suited those critics who deplore Milton's elaborately physical conflict of the powers of good and evil. Here Christ is symbolically clad in military costume, and is standing on a lion and a serpent, symbol of Satan and sin, whom he has vanquished.

FIG. 3. Early eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon illumination, The Fall of the Rebel Angels into Hell, Genesis B, p. 16, Bodleian Library.

FIG. 4, Cranach (1472-1553), War in Heaven, Luther's 1522 Wittenberg New Testament, Scheide Collection, Princeton University Library (Willard Starks photo).

Five hundred years later, we find a very different treatment, far more elaborate, and indeed strikingly comparable to Milton's descriptions (fig. 3). Here the warfare of light and darkness reaches its climax as Christ, the Son of God, himself expels the rebel angels, casting them over the threshold of heaven, and jettisoning them into the jaws of Hell. This illumination of the Anglo-Saxon Genesis B manuscript, executed shortly after the year 1000, illustrates the early stages of the visual tradition in which the War in Heaven was beginning to be elaborated.

The treatment of the War in Heaven was not restricted to painting as such, and examples may frequently be found in woodcuts and engravings (fig. 4). In the first edition of Luther's translation of the New Testament into German, there is an illustration by Cranach

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which was imitated in subsequent Protestant Bibles, both on the continent and in England. Here the monstrous figure of the dragon is used to combine all of the horrid elements of the demonic, and is separated from the conflict of the two groups of angels, faithful and unfaithful. The two armies are represented as mounted knights in armor-a conception which Waldock called "nonsense," and which he described as Milton's "treating us as morons."³ Milton's contemporaries, schooled in such works as those which we have seen, with their imaginations filled by a stock of images such as those presented here by Cranach, would not have felt that they were being treated as morons. An interesting feature of this particular War in Heaven is the presence of the horses, which correspond to the "fiery foaming steeds" of Milton's account of the War in Heaven (PL VI, 391); those heavenly steeds have troubled Professor Wayne Shurnaker,⁴ but would not have disturbed Milton's first readers. Another aspect to be noted is the appearance of Satan's forces on the left of this engraving. Here the rebel angels are dressed as Renaissance princes, and given the appearance of handsome and dashing cavaliers. This "giving the devil his due" had come into art over a century and a half before Milton's time, and it is that tradition which he carries on in his description of Satan and his followers.

That tradition is in marked contrast to the primary treatments of the Middle Ages, which may be illustrated by a miniature painting from an illuminated fifteenth-century French Treatise on the Antichrist (fig. 5). In the lower half,

FIG. 5. Fifteenth-century French illumination, Christ the Judge and Devils, Treatise on Antichrist, Bodleian Library MS. Douce: 134 fol. 98.

we see three medieval devils, highly typical of their period: distorted, disfigured, and hideous, summarizing the ugliness and destructiveness of evil, even down to harpy feet. Christian art was always much perplexed by the problem of representing the demonic: the demonic, according to the biblical and theological traditions, was a distortion of the created good, and as such was in essence ugly; on the other hand, it was recognized as powerfully tempting. The problem was to visualize the demonic in such a way that both elements-the distorted and the attractive-were combined. This dichotomy could scarcely be resolved in purely visual terms, and in the history of art we find a vacillation between one extreme and the other. In this medieval representation, we see the far extreme of ugliness.

³ A. J. A. Waldock, "Paradise Lost" and its Critics (Cambridge, 1964), pp. 108, 11 1.
⁴ Wayne Shumaker, Unpremeditated Verse: Feeling and Perception in "Paradise Lost" (Princeton, 1967), pp. 124-125.

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Before leaving this illumination, I should like to emphasize the rainbow throne upon which Christ is seated. The rainbow throne was for hundreds of years a standard attribute of Christ in judgment, and as such was indelibly imprinted upon the Christian imagination. Objections have been raised to Milton's describing Christ as expelling Satan from Heaven while seated on a rainbow throne (PL VI, 759), but that detail would have seemed quite natural in Milton's day. Indeed, some art works show Christ seated on this throne and in just such a chariot as is described in Paradise Lost when he expels the rebel angels from Heaven.

II

In the fifteenth century we begin to see some lines of change from this hideous presentation of the Devil. An illuminated French manuscript from about 1456 (fig. 6) portrays a monk painting a fresco in which he has represented a hideous devil, while a fashionably dressed figure climbs a ladder to remonstrate with the painter. The figure on the ladder, handsome though he is, may be identified as demonic by the small horns coming through his modish hat, as well as by the harpy feet. Here, the Devil appeals

FIG. 6. Jean Tavernier, The Devil asks for a More Flattering Portrait, Miracles de Nostre Dame, ca. 1456, Bodleian Library MS. Douce 374 fol. 93.

FIG. 7. Juan Jiminez, Michael and the Dragon, ca. 1500, John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

to a painter to give him a more complimentary picture.

The movement in art to a more complimentary visualization of the Devil was presumably due to a swing back along the spectrum of Christian understanding, the spectrum to which we have already referred, rather than to any demonic solicitation. By 1500, changes of a remarkable extent may be observed (fig. 7). A painting of about that date by Juan Jiminez shows the archangel Michael standing in triumph

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FiG. 8. Domenico Beccafumi (1484/6 1551), Michael and the Fallen Angels, Academy, Siena (Alinari-Art Reference Bureau).

upon the prostrate Satan. Michael, as we can see, is represented in full plate armor of the kind which critics have found objectionable in Milton, but what is primarily interesting to us is the face of the Devil himself, a face far removed from the distorted fiend of the Middle Ages. Considerable beauty remains in the face of this defeated Satan, along with much dignity, and even an heroic anguish. Of him, as of Milton's Satan, we may say that "deep scars of thunder" have darkened his countenance, but not erased all his beauty (PL 1, 599-603). He is overcome, but he remains no less "than archangel ruined, and tb' excess of glory obscured" (PL 1, 593f).

By the middle of the sixteenth century, the demonic forces had achieved an even greater measure of dignity, as we may see in Beccafumi's painting of Michael and the defeated demons (fig. 8). The fallen angels here as in Paradise Lost are shown as thick scattered, almost like the leaves in Vallombrosa, on the Lake of Hell but arising at the call of their leader. They have beautiful forms, and their faces are far from unlovely. The art historian Frederick Hartt was so impressed by the similarities between this painting and Paradise Lost that he suggested that the painting may have influenced Milton .⁵ Perhaps it did, but I am here more interested in the tracing of a general tradition of influence than in the discovery, or postulation, of particular sources. Within that context, we see something here which is closely akin to Milton's vision.

Before leaving this picture, I wish to point to the figure of Michael, standing in triumph. He is painted in armor with a military vest of purple, "prime/In manhood where youth ended," just as Milton described him (PL XI, 240-246). Milton has been castigated for introducing age differences among the ageless angels, but though "young angels" were not recognized in theology, they were widely encountered in art. Beccafumi was representing the majority tradition when he rendered Michael in this way, and Milton was describing the majority vision (even as to Michael's age and the color of his clothing) in his own verbal account of a young warrior in full armor, with purple surcoat.

In addition to objections to plate mail on the angels, readers have sometimes been puzzled by the different kind of armor which Milton gave Raphael -the "feathered mail" (PL V, 284) with which he describes that archangel as clothed. Now feathered mail was a typical attire for angels in England

⁵ Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art (New York, c. 1969), p. 51 1.

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FIG. 9. Early Tudor Sculpture, Angel in Feathered Mail, King's College Chapel, Cambridge (Royal Commission on Historical Monuments),

(fig. 9).⁶ It was based upon an adaptation to angels on the medieval stage of the old scale armor, in which pieces of metal or bone had been sewn together on a mail coat so as to provide protection.⁷ This scale armor had been directly adapted to angelic use by medieval artists who replaced the scales with feathers, and Milton's brief phrase is an altogether accurate description of many angels found in England, such as the one illustrated here from King's College Chapel in Cambridge. Similarly, when Milton adorned the heads of his angels with garlands of flowers, he was once again evoking an established visual convention, and was not straining the imagination of cultivated Europeans who were quite familiar with angels whose hair was decorated with floral wreaths. Many paintings from Simone Martini to Botticelli exemplify this tradition.

One of the features of Milton's treatment of angels which has been disputed by influential critics is his description of the arrival in Eden of the archangel Uriel. Uriel, the angel of the sun, does not fly to the earth, but rather slides down a sunbeam-"Thither came Uriel, gliding through the Even/On a sunbeam" (PL IV 555f)-which has seemed to some critics a rather undignified and even preposterous entry for an archangel. Analogues may be found in those numerous pictures of the Annunciation in which the dove representing the Holy Spirit glides down a sunbeam to the waiting Virgin, and in less frequent cases we might cite angels who appear to be coasting down sunbeams as in a Nativity painted by Andreas Giltlinger in 1522. But to my mind, the most charming analogue (fig. 10) is found in the illustration of those medieval fictionalized accounts of the childhood of Jesus, in which the boy Jesus is shown to have played a game of sliding down a sunbeam, as another child might slide down the banister rail of a stairway.

III

Let us turn now from Milton's treatment of angels and devils to consider

FIG. 10. Early thirteenth-century illumination, Christ Child on Sunbeam, from Enfancie de Nostre Seigneur, Bodleian Library MS. Selden supra 38, fol. 24.

⁶ E. S. Prior and A. Gardner, Medieval Figure Sculpture in England (Cambridge, 1912), p. 516; W. L. Hildburgh, "An English Alabaster Carving of Saint Michael Weighing a Soul," Burlington Magazine 89 (1947): pp. 129-131, and "English Alabaster Carvings as Records of the Medieval Religious Drama," Archacologia 93 (1949): pp. 51-101; M. D. Anderson, Imagery of British Churches, p. 137; Mary P. Perry, "On the Psychostasis in Christian Art," pp. 102-103; and E. S. Prior, "The Sculpture of Alabaster Tables," Illustrated Catalogue of the Exhibition of English Medieval Alabaster Work (London, 1913), for more general background.
⁷ See Sir Guy Francis Laking, A Record of European Armour and Arms Through Seven Centuries (London, 5 v., 1920-1922) 1: pp, 40-42 with illustrations, and George Cameron Stone, A Glossary of the Construction, Decoration and Use of Arms and Armor (Portland, Maine, 1934), p. 544.

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FIG. 11. Fourteenth-century English illumination, Lucifer Enthroned, Christ Creating, and the Jaws of Hell, Holkham Bible fol. 2, British Library Add. MS. 47682.

some of his visual descriptions of the cosmos (fig. 11). An early fourteenth century illustration from the great English Holkharn Bible shows Christ in the center circumscribing the visible universe by use of a compass. It is interesting to note that the fourteenth century artist has placed the realm of

FIG. 12. Raphael (1483-1520) and his school, God Creating the Animals, Vatican Loggia, Rome (Alinari-Art Reference Bureau).

Satan entirely outside the created universe, here indicated by the circle which the Son's compasses inscribe upon space: in the upper segment we see Satan seated upon his throne and honored by the rebel angels or deplored by faithful angels, whereas in the segment beneath we see the flaming jaws of Leviathan which represent Satan's kingdom in Hell. Milton's placing of Hell entirely outside the universe has often been remarked upon as one of his most brilliant metaphors, as indeed it is, but the way was prepared for it by the visual arts.

One of the most curious descriptions in Paradise Lost concerns the creation of the animals, who are said by Milton to have erupted from the ground itself, pushing their way up out of the earth at the command of God. We may see a depiction of precisely the same scene by Raphael and his studio in a painting open to the public view in Milton's time as today in the Vatican Loggias (fig. 12). The animals are arising from within the earth, a horse has just pushed his head above the ground in the right-hand side, while in the left, a dog is appearing, a bear moves up from the earth between the dog and the lion, and to the left of the feet of the Almighty a catlike creature is emerging.

One of the most disputed descriptions in Paradise Lost is Milton's reference to the fruit of the Garden of Eden as "vegetable gold" or as "ruddy and gold," descriptions which he uses in varied forms a full five times (PL IV, 148, 219-220, 249; IX, 429, and 578). From Joseph Warton in 1753 to F. R. Leavis in our time,8 many critics have

⁸ Wharton, in Adventurer 2, 101, reprinted in Eighteenth-Century Critical Essays, ed. Scott Elledge (Ithaca, N. Y., 1961) 2: p. 713; F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (London, 1936), p. 50.

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strenuously objected to this mixture of the vegetable and the metallic, and have regarded it as an impossible strain upon our visual faculties. Others (most notably perhaps Douglas Bush9) have written cogent defenses of Milton's phrases, but on neither side of the debate does anyone appear to have made any effort to ascertain how fruit was colored in paintings of the Garden of Eden. Once we have begun to took, we find repeatedly that the fruit conforms to Milton's vegetable gold, or to his ruddy and gold, as in a delftware platter made in London in 1634, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. A similarly golden hue is given to the forbidden fruit in a stained-glass window installed in University College, Oxford, only a short time before Milton went down to Oxfordshire and married his first wife. The visual convention of vegetable gold was firmly established, and we can see the same thing, or sometimes a closer approximation of Milton's alternate phrase "ruddy and gold," in paintings by Cranach and others.

Another element of many paintings of the Fall which should be noted is the presence of a bough with fruit in Adam's or Eve's hand, which is placed so as to achieve a cosmetic or at least Bowdlerizing effect, obscuring the private parts. Dürer's placing of the leafy bough in Eve's hand typifies a widespread use of that bough in art (fig. 13). For many years, I was curious as to why Milton had Eve bring Adam not merely a piece of the fruit, but a bough with the fruit, and I think now that we may ascribe this description to the tradition of art, in which, time after time, Adam or Eve or both are shown with boughs in their hands. Milton no

FIG. 13. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), The Fall, 1504, National Gallery of Art: Rosenwald Collection, Washington.

longer needed (and certainly did not want) that bough for purposes of concealment, but it was so much a part of his imaginative background that he included it anyway, even though he explicitly declared that the private parts of Adam and Eve were not covered until after they had fallen.

One of the curious elements of Milton's descriptions in Paradise Lost concerns his serpent who tempts Eve. Milton has the serpent not "Prone on the ground, as since, but on his rear," an impressive standing figure "erect amidst his circling spires" (PL IX, 497ff). While moving, Milton's serpent coils the lower parts of the tail to provide for locomotion, and yet keeps the rest of his body quite upright. The description seems odd, and has sometimes been characterized even more unflatteringly (John Ciardi called it Milton's "rear-wheel-drive" serpent),¹⁰

⁹ Douglas Bush, "Paradise Lost" in Our Time (New York, 1948), pp. 96-97, and 95.
¹⁰ John Ciardi, "A Poem Talks to Itself," Saturday Review (January 24, 1959), p. 12.

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FIG. 14. Holbein (1497/8-1543) (attributed to), The Fall, Luther Bible, Lyons, 1544, Scheide Collection, Princeton University (Willard Starks photo).

until we find its visual counterpart (fig. 14). Here we see the serpent standing between Eve and the Tree in a print which illustrates the 1542 edition of Luther's Bible. The print is attributed to Holbein, but I am not convinced, for this particular serpent seems to me singularly ungraceful for a Holbein product. Cranach had provided a far more attractive version in his frontispiece for the first edition of Luther's Bible, but the most attractive artistic presentation of this tradition is in a series of tapestries on the Genesis story (fig. 15) which were created for the Medici grand dukes in the 1550's, and which were in their possession at the time of Milton's visit to Florence. In a detailed view, we see a very graceful serpent, standing erect on his tail coils, undulating as in Milton, and with his mouth open in speech as "of old some orator renowned/ In Athens or free Rome" (PL IX, 670f.). Whether Milton acquired his conception of the serpent from these tapestries, from the illustrations of a Bible, or elsewhere, is immaterial: the point is that he was referring to a well-established visual tradition in his description, and eliciting its images in the minds of his readers.

FIG. 15. Sixteenth-century Flemish, Medici tapestries, The Fall, ca. 1550, detail, Accademia, Florence (Alinari-Art Reference Bureau).

IV

Sometimes we come upon a painting which seems to be unique in the art tradition at precisely the same point of visualizing where Milton appears to be unique in the literary tradition. We find such an example (fig. 16) in the Fall of Man by Salviati, done in the midsixteenth century. About Adam's feet we see a number of cut flowers, which have fallen and scattered in disarray, and some of which have begun to wither. I have been able to discover nothing like this anywhere else in art, but Milton provides the identical incident in Paradise Lost (IX, 839-843, 892-893), for which I am aware of no analogue in literature. You will recall that when Adam goes to meet Eve at noon on the day of the Fall, he brings a garland of flowers which he has plucked for her, but when he sees her he

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FiG. 16. Cecchino Salviati (Francesco de' Rossi) (1510-1563, The Fall, Colonna Gallery, Rome.

instantly knows to his own consternation that she has already fallen, and he lets the flowers drop to the ground at his feet, where they begin to wither, just as they do in Salviati's painting. It must always be assumed that Milton was capable of creating such a motif out of his own imagination, and so we need not posit a direct source relationship to this painting, but the similarity of these unique treatments is so striking as to require notice.

Whatever we may assume about this unique convergence on plucked flowers by Salviati and Milton is incidental to the major concern of my study. I have not been looking for particular and identifiable sources, but for broader, well-established and widely recogniz-able traditions of visualizing to which Milton could appeal in establishing credible visual components for his epic. It is important for us as readers to know both when Milton is evoking an established visual tradition, and when he is altering that tradition-and we miss both the evocation and the alteration unless we know the visual tradition itself. Milton could not describe Adam and Eve ad vivam, and the same applies to Michael and Lucifer, Uriel and Beelzebub, Heaven and Hell. Within the present range of human knowledge, the principal characters, events, and places of Paradise Lost have a visual existence only in art, and if Milton's verbal descriptions of them were to be visually convincing to his contemporaries they could be so only in reference to that great reservoir of iconography to which Berenson referred when he said that it was the function of artists to "stock the mind with images."¹¹

If we today re-stock our minds with those images, we shall find that Milton's descriptive words have been so chosen as to select, and exclude, and alter, and evoke impressions of great visual power. When we read his epic with such a prepared imagination, we find that the visual objections which have been raised against Paradise Lost do not represent a blindness of imagination on the part of John Milton, but rather a blindness of perception on the part of certain of his critics.

¹¹ Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance (New York, 1964), p. 134.