February 14, 2014
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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54 Winifred Hunt, "On Even Ground: A Note on the Extramundane Location of Hell in Paradise Lost," MLQ 23 (1962), 17-18.
[142] The Demonic World
S3 which we see the jaws of Leviathan, while Queen Mary's Psalter allows only the
56 slightest intersection between the circles representing the created universe and Hell.
In the sixteenth century, Bruegel's Fall of the Rebel Angels pictures Michael and
his hosts pursuing the already grossly deformed rebel angels down toward Hell,
5 far below the luminous globe of the created universe above them. In Civetta, Hell
is a grim metropolis on a barren and fiery plain, above which we see represented
tot the globe of a Ptolemaic universe with planets orbiting within it — as close a visual
equivalent as one could possibly hope to find to Milton's poetically described "firm
opacous globe/ Of this round World" (in, 418-19).
The Chaos which separates Hell from the Universe in Paradise Lost is essen- tially unpaintable:
Before their eyes in sudden view appear
The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark
Illimitable ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and highth,
And time and place are lost.
(11, 890-94)
That description is exclusively literary, and its defining terms prohibit even the possibility of finding an equivalent in art. Painting, sculpture, and mosaic work are alike in presenting a scene through dimension, through length, breadth, height, and place — but Milton explicitly cancels every dimension, every limit, every measure.
55 In Whitney's Emblems, Chaos is represented by a confusion of lines and shapes crossing each other, in the center of which are the Greek letters which spell out the word, 56 but here art is abandoned in favor of a labeled cartoon. In the Last Judgment diptych by Van Eyck, the skeletal specter of Death has its bat wings labeled Chaos Magnum and also Umbra Mortis, for even Van Eyck could present Chaos only by personification. Lorenzo Lotto executed a curious allegory entitled Magnum Chaos in intarsia for Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, but again we are involved only in allegory. 57 But Milton's description of Chaos remains unique; nowhere is his exploitation of the literary mode more complete than here, and nowhere are we further removed from any direct relevance to the art tradition. Yet, although he virtually abandons the visual, he continues to employ a powerfully sensuous imagery as he describes how
eagerly the fiend
O'er bog or steep, through straight, rough, dense, or rare,
