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| Engraving by John Martin for Paradise Lost, 1667. |
In other words, he was the perfect gloom and doomer to create
the engravings to illustrate John Milton’s Paradise
Lost (1667), a complicated and controversial work, which retells the
world’s oldest story.
Blind as Homer and permanently exiled from political life
after the Restoration of 1660, John Milton dictated an epic of the series of
falls — of the angels, of Adam and Eve, of human language — that led to the
corrupt and warlike world in which he lived. His declared intention was to
“assert eternal providence / And justify the ways of God to men.” But as every
reader of Paradise Lost can attest, Lucifer and the other fallen angels come
out far more interesting than God, a peculiarity that prompted William Blake to
claim that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it”.
Illustrators of Paradise Lost have often drawn more from the
poem’s infernal depths than its heavenly heights. Blake’s wild watercolors
(painted in about 1807) delight in depicting the muscular immensity of Satan,
spying on Adam and Eve and coaxing them to sin. Gustave Doré’s etchings (circa
1866) bask in the possibilities of inky darkness and pay special attention to
the angels’ wings, which are swan-like as long as they are allied with heaven
but turn bat-like the moment they fall.
In 1824, the English artist John Martin (1789–1854) was
commissioned to offer up his own interpretation — producing a set of images
that were originally sold to subscribers and then, in 1827, used to adorn a
large two-volume edition of the poem. His mezzotint engravings, too, emphasize
the devil and the darkness. Like Blake, he portrays the bodies of God, the
angels, Adam and Eve as classically beautiful; like Doré, he uses light and
shadow to point up the drama inherent in Milton’s scenes. But Martin, a radical
romantic at heart, is especially excited by the drama of the scenery — whether
the caverns and crags of hell or the English oaks and cumulonimbus clouds of
Eden.
The genre of scenery ranges widely. In one engraving, we see
Eve alone in a pastoral landscape crowded with trees, looking “into the clear /
Smooth lake, that to me seemed another Skie”. In another, we find God dividing
light from darkness in a celestial swirl of eerie fluorescence, water, and mist.
Early in the epic, we behold Satan holding court, as Laura Cumming puts it, “in
what looks like a solo performance in the Albert Hall”. And, at the end, we
wonder over Adam and Eve clad like the Flintstones, cast out of the Garden into
an endless waste, which is apparently inhabited by dinosaurs.
Much in Martin’s landscapes is recognizably romantic. As
modern day blog PillartoPost.org
cheekily remarks “Adam and Eve look like posed on one of the long fairways at
the Augusta National golf course. Alas,
forgive the unwarranted interjection into this essay.
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| Engraving by John Martin “The Bridge Over Chaos” from 1667 edition of “Paradise Lost.” |
More John Martin
illustrations: Click here.
Read more about John Martin
in an essay by Public Domain Review’s Max Adams, “John Martin and the Theatre
of Subversion“. Click here.
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