Barrators, who traded in public office and bribed courts, hypocrites whose clothes are weighted with lead, and thieves who are stuck in a pit of snakes.
narrative
The star of Bethlehem from Giotto to Blake, a solar eclipse seen in Spain in 1905, Donati’s comet, and two impossible events with the sun and moon together in the sky.
Visiting the ‘rottenpockets’ full of tormented souls guilty of pimping, seduction, flattery, selling church privileges, nepotism, fortune-telling, and corruption in public office.
Gravediggers, Christ as a gardener, itinerant foresters, road workers, snow-clearers, a vegetable gardener plagued by moles, and sandcastles on the beach.
In Gérôme’s early success The Cock Fight, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, Murillo’s Adoration of the Shepherds, and many farmyard paintings.
Descending past the Minotaur of Crete, they reach a group of centaurs and travel on past famous killers, into a wood of thorn trees of those who committed suicide.
Love is blind, so is Cupid, as well as the personification of Fortune. Also applied to those about to be executed, and to celebrate our sense of sight in a widespread game of blind man’s buff.
He taught, and travelled more. Paintings include ‘Death, the Reaper’ and one of the last of his major oil paintings, ‘A Masque for the Four Seasons’ with its references to Botticelli’s Primavera.
The three Furies appear on top of the gate to Dis, and try to turn Dante to stone using the face of Medusa. Once allowed in, they meet some of the heretics in their burning tombs.
Is this Hecate, triple-headed goddess of the night, with owl and bats, or another of Blake’s mythology, representing spiritual beauty? A misidentified painting explained.
The Eclectic Light Company 