Art 2 - Matthew Sturgis hopes a new show will reinstate Milton in the national consciousness

When travelling across England in 1782, Carl Philip Moritz was amazed to discover that his landlady, a tailor's widow, was a devotee of Paradise Lost, and that "her late husband first fell in love with her on this very account: because she read Milton with such proper emphasis". Milton and his epic were once part of the national consciousness. Paradise Lost was cited as an authority on everything from republicanism, political revolt and personal freedom to married love, landscape gardening and domestic cookery.

Yet now Paradise Lost has itself been lost. Who can even quote a line of it? Something of our great loss is revealed (and will, let us hope, be reversed) by an exhibition at the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere, Cumbria. The setting is apt. The Romantic poets were passionate admirers of Paradise Lost. Wordsworth was hailed as "the best knower of Milton" of his generation, and he even composed a sonnet to the poet. The exhibition points up these connections and weaves them into the unfolding story. But it triumphs as a collection of stupendous pictures.

There is Hogarth's seething, crepuscular vision of Satan, Sin and Death and James Gillray's jaunty skit on it (with William Pitt in the role of Death); fine works by minor artists, minor works by great ones (Turner's illustrations are pretty thin); and wall upon wall of William Blakes. With such riches, one can easily endure the disappointment of having only a small print of de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon - a late 18th-century precursor of the cinema, in which puppets performed scenes from Paradise Lost against a backdrop illuminated by a display of coloured lights.

No other English poem has inspired such a wealth of illustration. But it was a symbiotic relationship. It was, apparently, the first illustrated edition of Paradise Lost in 1688 that really ignited interest in the work. Only 3,000 copies were sold in the first 11 years of its literary life. After 1688, it became a bestseller. Over the next two centuries, editions proliferated and print runs lengthened, illustrators vying with each other to interpret the scenes laid out by Milton's bold, suggestive verse.

At one level, the basic matter of Milton's story - the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden - was a staple of western art. Illustrators could adapt, or even just adopt, the old conventions. The first interpreters appear conventional enough. But Milton's tale is very different in tone and detail from the Bible's, and gradually those differences appear in the pictures. The most striking development is the representation of Satan. The earliest pictures have him as the horned, goat-shanked demon of folklore; the majesty of Milton's "archangel ruined" is entirely absent. A new note - far closer to Milton's vision - was struck in the amazing pictures that Henry Fuseli did for an 1802 edition. Satan has become both human and heroic, a great leader marshalling his troops for a brave but doomed campaign. Fuseli's compositions are more fluid and daring than anything that has gone before. At times they seem almost to prefigure the action images of manga or Marvel comics.

Blake's images are rather more stately but no less novel, and they are perhaps even truer to Milton's words. They pulse with an extraordinary intensity and freshness. The Temptation and Fall of Eve - with Eve loosely entwined in the serpent's folds, taking the apple from its mouth into her own - is fraught with a bizarre eroticism. The Expulsion, instead of the conventional biblical iconography of a weeping Adam and Eve driven from paradise by an armed archangel, more truly reflects the closing lines of the poem, with a note of hope, expectation and promise.

The touching humanity of Blake's vision stands in rude contrast to the bravura images produced 20 years later by John "Mad" Martin. His vast mezzotint hell-scapes, his panoramic Eden in which Adam and Eve are almost lost, reverse the humanising trend. There is a cinematic quality to the images, but this is blockbuster cinema in which the special effects dwarf the participants.

The world into which Martin's Adam and Eve are expelled is a desolate and lowering wilderness, with - in the distance - two dinosaurs disporting themselves. Martin, it seems, kept abreast of the latest scientific discoveries, and his beasts have claims to be the first diplodocuses recorded in British art. They are certainly among many unexpected pleasures in this enthralling exhibition.

"Milton: Paradise Lost - the poem and its illustrators" is at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, Cumbria (01539 435 544) until 31 October

Matthew Sturgis is the author of Walter Sickert: a life, to be published by HarperCollins in January 2005

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website