![]() At its head was a lavish portrait, whose accompanying epigram by Dryden compared Milton to the great classical poets, Virgil and Homer. Unlike the previous editions, this one was large (about the size of a modern coffee table book), beautifully printed, ornamented with twelve full-page engravings by prominent European artists, and very expensive. That year he released the fourth edition of Paradise Lost, whose title page advertises it as 'Adorn'd with Sculptures' (then a common term for engravings). The publisher Jacob Tonson, whose list of fashionable contemporary authors included Dryden, Pope and Addison, obtained the rights to Milton's poem and grabbed the chance to turn it into a classic. Milton seemed destined to be remembered as one of those great, unread English poets. The poem's popularity gradually grew, but by 1687, no new edition of Paradise Lost had appeared on the shelves for a decade. At first it sold very slowly, prompting Simmons to print several new title pages in an attempt to drum up interest at the bookstalls. The first copies were modest volumes with no portrait, no preface, no dedicatory verses. Published by Samuel Simmons in 1667, the first edition of Paradise Lost had been a run-of-the-mill affair, even compared to Milton's earlier collection of shorter poems. Our story begins towards the end of the seventeenth century. Paradise Lost's illustrations have played an important part in shaping the poem we know today. Its twelve plates were designed by at least three different artists. The fourth edition of Paradise Lost (1688) was the first to contain illustrations. But first, let us turn back to 1688, the year Milton's readers were first presented with poetry in pictures. In the minds of illustrators, this familiar trove of Christian iconography sometimes jostles against Milton's re-envisaging of biblical events. Yet as we shall see, some of Paradise Lost's most illustrated tableaux, such as the Temptation or the Expulsion, had a long history in Christian art before Milton. Such is the richness of Milton's poem that it can sustain innumerable imaginings of the same scene. Wells, an artist such as Gustave Doré could produce his extraordinary science fiction image of Satan's flight to earth. By the nineteenth century, the age of Jules Verne and H.G. In the eighteenth century, painters and engravers with a new-found passion for landscape began to look to Milton's epic as a storehouse of the Sublime - the rolling vistas of Eden, or the flaming, subterranean crags of Hell. Like Milton himself, these artists looked at the visual world of God's creation and found it filled with deeper symbolism. Paradise Lost's early illustrators drew episodes from the poem with an eye for the emblematic: Satan as a cormorant sitting in the Tree of Life, the golden scales of justice in the sky over Eden. Satan, for example, looks very different in 1680 to how he looks in 1860.Īlong with the shifting tides of artistic taste came new ways of looking at Milton. Apart from being beautiful artefacts in themselves, these books and their engraved plates are an invaluable sign of what Paradise Lost meant to the periods that produced them. ![]() Between the late seventeenth and early twentieth centuries a flurry of illustrated editions of Paradise Lost appeared. Generations of painters, draughtsmen and printmakers have tried - and sometimes failed - to create a visual equivalent of Milton's poetry.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |