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Milton and Satan

Table of Contents

• Literary Source
• Artistic Context: A Network of Influence
• Social, Historical, and Literary Contexts

William Blake’s description of Milton as being “of the Devil’s party without knowing it” [1] is the dominating sentiment behind the style and subject of the anonymous painting Satan Leaving the Court of Chaos—a painting that depicts a Satan who is appealing and dynamic. [2] Blake also asserted that Milton “wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell.” [3] The powerful and alluring qualities of Satan in Milton’s text are conveyed in this vivid painting as the image’s striking composition and Satan’s dominant form captivate the audience. However, the painting goes beyond Blake’s assessment of Milton and his poetry, capturing in its ambiguity the complexity of Milton’s portrayal of Satan and its roots in seventeenth-century religion and politics.

Paradise Lost was first published in 1667 and illustrated as early as 1688 (Fig. 1). [4] Since 1688, there have been more than thirty-six illustrated versions of Paradise Lost [5], giving each illustrator a growing visual history on which to draw and making the creator of the Ackland’s Satan Leaving the Court of Chaos yet one more contributor to this heritage. The painter of this work, however, remains among a small handful of artists who have selected this particular scene in Paradise Lost as the subject for their paintings. [6]

Literary Source

The passage illustrated in the painting falls in Book II of Paradise Lost and tells of an episode during Satan’s journey out of Hell toward the earthly paradise of Adam and Eve. Before Satan can pass into the realm he seeks, however, he must travel through “a dark / Illimitable ocean without bound, / Without dimension where length, breadth, and highth, / And time and place are lost; where eldest Night / And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold / Eternal anarchy.” [7] Here Chaos as “umpire sits,” [8] while “next him high arbiter / Chance governs all.” [9] Satan travels toward this court as “nigh foundered on he fares, / Treading the crude consistence, half on foot / Half flying,” [10] until he encounters the “Court of Chaos” and the subject of this painting:

…behold the throne
Of Chaos, and his dark pavilion spread
Wide on the wasteful deep; with him enthroned
Sat sable-vested Night, eldest of things,
The consort of his reign; and by them stood
Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name
Of Demogorgon; Rumor next and Chance,
And Tumult and Confusion all embroiled,
And Discord with a thousand various mouths. [11]

Satan addresses Chaos and Night, assuaging possible suspicion by informing them of his plan to pass through their realm and on to the land they had recently lost to “th’ Ethereal King.” [12] Chaos, having heard the violent sounds of Satan’s rebellion, gives Satan direction and permission to leave his domain: “go and speed; / Havoc and spoil and ruin are my gain.” [13] Satan then hurries on toward the “glimmering dawn” [14] leaving Hell and Chaos behind for the “pendent world, in bigness as a star.” [15]

In the Ackland painting (Fig. 2), Satan and the members of Chaos’s court are depicted at the moment of Satan’s departure toward the home of God’s new creation, man:

…Satan stayed not to reply,
But glad that now his sea should find a shore,
With fresh alacrity and force renewed
Springs upward like a pyramid of fire
Into the wild expanse, and through the shock
Of fighting elements, on all sides round
Environed wins his way… [16]

The other characters described in the passage also feature in the scene, the central figure being Chaos. His bodily gestures, including his extended hand, indicate that he has granted Satan permission to pass onward. This cluster sits opposite Satan’s figure, acting as a balance to his muscular, elongated frame. The painter reinforces Satan’s grandeur by balancing his powerful, singular form with a group of several figures. Adjacent to Chaos and covered by a dark cloak sits “sable-vested Night, eldest of things,” [17] as described in the poem. The remaining eight characters in Milton’s text (Orcus, Ades, Demogorgon, Rumor, Chance, Tumult, Confusion, and Discord) [18] are less easily identified.

There are eight additional figures in the painting: five behind Chaos and Night; one standing behind Night, blending in with the dark background as he faces away from the viewer; two separated from the tight cluster; one almost behind Satan, parallel to his extended left leg, and one below and behind him, visible under his raised, right leg. The dark tones make it difficult to distinguish clouds from figures in some places, but they reflect the textual descriptions of this place where “Chaos, and his dark pavilion spread / Wide on the wasteful deep.” [19]

Ultimately, however, we cannot say for certain who is who in the painting (apart from Satan, Chaos, and Night). This very ambiguity, like the character and emotional state of Satan himself, leaves much for the viewer to determine. [20] Like Milton’s text, the painting forces the reader-viewer to assess and interpret the scenes and characters. To appreciate how the artist realizes this uncertainty in his depiction of Satan, let us turn to the other half of the painting and his stylized representation of this enigmatic and dynamic character (Fig. 2).

Satan’s pose, emphasizing his taut, muscular body and dramatic gesture, frozen mid-movement, impress upon the viewer his power as they indicate his departure from Chaos’s presence. His extended arm and finger suggest his new heading, while the tension and strength of his body represent his “force renewed.” The dramatic angle of his body fills and diagonally bisects the left side of the image, creating a powerful counter-angle to the grouping of the Court. His military helmet and weaponry, as well as the power suggested in his flexed musculature, refer to both the battle that has occurred and the more insidious war he has yet to wage against God and man. Though such qualities associate him with the actions of mortal men, the presence of his extended wings, the strange setting of the scene, and his unusual skin-tight suit urge the viewer to recognize his supernatural power. Though these elements suggest that the painter emulated sixteenth-century Mannerist paintings, with their elongated, taut figures in seemingly awkward poses, they also remind the contemporary viewer of the sort of suit and position of a modern superhero, a Superman, taking off in flight. Such similarities in physical strength and dress further associate Satan with the figure of a hero for the audience of today.

The artist’s choice to avoid delineating Satan’s face highlights the very complexity and enigmatic quality of this iconic figure and compels the audience to sympathize with him (Fig. 4). Milton depicts Satan as such a complex individual that it is no wonder the artist felt overwhelmed in trying to portray his emotional state. [21] By not including the details of Satan’s expression the artist compels the viewer to empathize with Satan and imagine his thoughts and feelings. Putting the viewer in this interpretive position allows Satan to function as a sort of blank canvas upon which viewers can create Satan as they imagine him and realize their own anxieties regarding this character or their own dark desires. His very inscrutability in this scene heightens his power as he absorbs our attention and remains just out of reach except within our own imaginations. At the same time, this potentially attributes the depth Milton grants Satan to the artist’s visual representation of the character. [22]

Cigoli (Lodovico Cardi) Italian, 1559-1613 (designer); Cornelis Galle I, Flemish, 1576-1650 (engraver): Lucifer, from the Divine Comedy, c. 1596 - c. 1605/8, engraving, 27.8 x 20.4 cm. (11 x 8 in.). The William A. Whitaker Foundation Art Fund, 2006.21.2

Based on the work of another great poet, Dante, this engraving shows a very different conception of Satan from Milton’s. Monstrous and hideous, he is gigantic but immobilized, at the center of the earth, embedded to the waist in eternal ice.

The sort of complexity that Milton represents in Satan’s characterization and that the painter tries to convey, here through obfuscation, results in a text and image that dramatically affect their audiences. The idea of a character as neither wholly good nor wholly evil, and what allows us to sympathize with Satan in Paradise Lost, clearly characterizes much of the sort of literature that we study today and can be located not only in the complex characters of Shakespeare and Milton but in Keats’s description of negative capability and much of the creative work of the modern and post-modern eras.

Artistic Context: A Network of Influence

Satan Leaving the Court of Chaos not only echoes characteristics of its literary and historic context but reflects qualities of eighteenth-century art and artists as well. For example, artistic elements that characterize Fuseli’s art and philosophy indicate the network of influence, if not the origin, that shaped the painting. The angular, seemingly unnatural posture of Satan and the excessive physicality of his form echo much of Fuseli’s work, including Fuseli’s drawing Satan Starts from the Touch of Ithuriel’s Spear, which incorporates the detailed musculature, subject, and dramatic “V” layout of Satan. Fuseli’s Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent (Fig. 5) also shows the stylized male body that he frequently included in his work—a body, like that of the Satan in this painting, which, as Martin Myrone points out, possesses “the almost monochrome colour” that “gives Thor’s body a metallic or undead quality, or more accurately, a sculptural character, which is typical of Fuseli’s treatment of his most heroic heroes.” [23] The creator of Satan, with his statuesque hero and use of dramatic composition, most certainly appreciated this style. Of course, the extent to which particular works by Fuseli influenced the painter of this work depends on the date of its creation. [24]

Fuseli’s interest in Paradise Lost led him to create his own Milton Gallery. Inspired by John Boydell’s successful Shakespeare Gallery, which opened in 1789 and to which Fuseli and other artists of the day contributed (Fig. 6), Fuseli spent the 1790s trying to realize his own vision for a gallery devoted to Milton. Fuseli’s Milton Gallery, which originally opened in 1799, featured only his own work and never met with great success. [25] However, Fuseli clearly found a fertile ground for his dramatic style, with its elements of fantasy, nightmare, and physicality—qualities that also characterize Satan—in the work of Milton.

Henry Fuseli, Swiss, 1741-1825 (painter); Robert Thew, British, 1758-1802 (engraver): Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act I, Scene iv, 1796, engraving, 50.0 x 63.5 cm. (19-5/8 x 25 in.). Early accession, source unknown, 58.16.1

Part of the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, this print shows many of the trademarks of Fuseli’s style that were adopted by the anonymous creator of the Ackland painting. Hamlet’s violent contortion as he strives to approach the ghost of his father, and the ghost’s curious gesture, pointing across his body rather than using his other hand, are both found in the image of Satan in the Ackland painting.

Though Fuseli aligned himself with the neo-classical style, there are certainly aspects of his art that characterize Fuseli’s work and Satan as examples of pre-Romantic art, including their representation of the sublime. In A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke describes the sublime as:

Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. [26]

In contrast to those things that are beautiful and “induce in us a sense of affection and tenderness,” [27] evoking feelings of love, the sublime typically relates to something awe-inspiring in its grandeur and potential threat but that can still be enjoyed and appreciated. [28] Burke identifies Milton as a master of the sublime, particularly in his depiction of Satan: “We do not any where meet a more sublime description than this justly celebrated one of Milton, wherein he gives the portrait of Satan with a dignity so suitable to the subject.” [29] The pleasure gained among dark and lofty heights and majestic scenes in nature also characterize much of Romantic poetry, especially in works such as Wordsworth’s Prelude and Shelley’s Mont Blanc, and in Satan we detect the artist’s efforts to represent qualities of the sublime in the powerful form of Satan’s strong, taut body and the dark and frightening environment of the court. Though the painting cannot evoke true feelings of terror and awe in its viewers, who remain safe on this side of the two-dimensional canvas, it does allude to these stylistic qualities of Milton’s text.

Social, Historical, and Literary Contexts

The historical context, too, of both the painting and text must be considered in order to fully appreciate Satan and its source. Milton was a revolutionary, using the tools of his trade to lambaste the monarch and provoke his readers to demand change. He wrote several pamphlets criticizing the excesses and violations of individual rights executed by the monarchy of Charles I. After the dissolution of the Long Parliament in 1648 he wrote The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in February 1649, which argued for the deposing, even the execution, of a king by any willing and able to seek justice, thereby showing his support of the new Parliament and military power. [30] In 1654 he wrote in support of Cromwell, [31] but by 1659 he had become disenchanted with the Lord Protector as well. [32] Though Milton may not have been attempting to re-write the Old Testament or pen an explicitly political manifesto when he wrote Paradise Lost, given his own strong religious and political beliefs, it is no wonder that the rebel figure Satan appears as appealing and sympathetic or that others would view Milton and Paradise Lost in this light. However, his portrayal of Satan remains somewhat ambiguous and very complex, for while Satan certainly possesses dynamic and appealing qualities and even speaks in the language of Milton’s republicanism and his The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth [33], Satan’s tyranny, like that of the leaders who so disappointed Milton, stems from the ambition and “monarchal pride” [34] that ultimately ensure his failure. [35] Yet such complexity has not dissuaded others from holding Satan up as a model for liberty and revolution.

Later writers and artists who supported reform in their own times took up Milton’s example as represented in the rebel Satan, including the Romantics. The American Revolution began in 1776, and not long after that, the French Revolution began in 1789. While most holding the social and political power in England saw both as reflections of moral and intellectual depravity on the part of the Americans and the French, others looked to these events as reflecting the power of the imagination and the individual to stand up against de-humanizing government and reclaim independence and self-direction. In this light, Satan, like Prometheus, represents the pursuit of a personal vision or belief that, although it may cost individual life and happiness, leads to ultimate freedom—something those who sympathized with the American and French Revolutions admired.

Several Romantic poets, writing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Byron, Shelley, and even initially Wordsworth, saw hope in the early days of the French Revolution, before it became the violent bloodbath of the Reign of Terror, which began in 1792. Shelley even refers to Satan in his Preface to Prometheus Unbound, favoring Prometheus’s altruism over Satan’s selfishness, but admiring the self-determination of both iconic figures when he writes, “The only imaginary being resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan.” [36] Though Shelley lived and wrote after the possible 1784 creation date of the painting under consideration here, the charged significance of Milton, his work, and the character of Satan to Romantic writers and general “free-thinkers” of this and later periods sheds a valuable interpretive light on Satan as a product of an historical and artistic context.

From its initial publication to the present, Paradise Lost has inspired some and challenged others. As a work reflecting a period and a historical context it continues to be an integral part of the literary canon, and we may never fully appreciate the extent of its influence on other artistic works and their creators, as evident in Satan Leaving the Court of Chaos. While questions persist regarding this painting and its artist, as well as the work that inspired them, the very enigmatic quality surrounding each of these serves as another layer reflecting the depth and complexity of Milton and his creation. As we strive to answer the questions they raise, we find that like past assessments of Milton, who may indeed have been “of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” the power of this poem and the painting lies not in where the lines of interpretation and understanding are clear and direct but in the borders of haziness, the liminal space where we must piece together our own conclusions from historical, artistic, and literary gleanings and from the knowledge and power of the imagination that lies within ourselves.