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. Since its first illustrated edition rolled off the press in 1688, Paradise Lost has fired the imaginations of artists.
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