Milton and the Visual Imagination

Reviews Milton and the Visual Imagination HUGH MACCALLUM Roland Mushat Frye. Milton 's Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic Poems Princeton University Press 1978. xxv, 408. 261 plates, plus 8 in colour. $37.50 In Renaissance and Refonnation studies during the last quarter century there has been a remarkable burgeoning of criticism which seeks to relate literature and the visual arts. Such historians as Jean Seznec, Erwin Panofsky, and Edgar Wind have provided the inspiration and the context for a re-evaluation of the place of visual iconography in literature, and in this process Milton has received some share of attention. In Milton 's Imagery and the Visual Arts Roland Mushat Frye brings together the results of previous studies and adds his own very comprehensive review of visual elements in Milton's epics. The student of visual imagery in Milton's poetry, especially the later poetry, must acknowledge certain difficulties from the outset. One - the most obviousis that Milton was blind when he wrote his epics, and that consequently all their visual scenes and images were apprehended only by the inward eyes of the poet, those eyes for which he sought the aid of celestial light. Another problem is that in his extensive prose writings Milton gives little evidence of a specialist's interest in painting and sculpture. Even his account of his European journey, which reveals a certain amount about his literary contacts, tells us nothing about what he saw, and Frye as a consequence must speculate that his sight-seeing in Italy would have been similar to the experience of such contemporary travellers as John Evelyn. Finally, Milton's epic poetry, unlike that of his predecessor Spenser, treats of times and places which do not offer many opportunities for the description of tapestries, sculptures, and paintings, and thus it lacks the concern with artifacts that is so marked in the Faerie Queene. In spite of such initial difficulties Frye leaves one in no doubt that the visual arts are of importance to Paradise Lost and ParadiseRegained.His work should also help to remove any lingering influence ofT.S. Eliot's dictum that Milton lacked a visual imagination. Frye ranges widely through the arts - including painting, sculpture, architecture, and landscape gardening - in search of parallels with Milton's epics, and the result is a book which should prove a basic work of UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLIX, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1979/80 0042-0247/ 8o/ o100-0176$oo.oo/o © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS reference. The central sections explore the four 'worlds' of Paradise Lost (the demonic, the heavenly, the created, the human), and a further chapter shows that Paradise Regained, in spite of its more abstract quality, is also indebted to visual traditions. Clearly much loving and painstaking care has gone into gathering and organizing the visual materials of this study, and students of Milton will be grateful that it was possible to provide so many handsome reproductions of works ranging from sixth-century mosaics through illuminations from the eleventh-century Genesis B manuscript to a wide selection of late medieval and Renaissance pictures. (The size and number of the reproductions make the price of the volume remarkably low. Unfortunately plate VIII reappears by error as figure 47.) Frye is at his best when providing the contexts for understanding particular images in Milton's epics. He has a sharp eye for detail, and it is helpful to know that the 'headlong' fall of the rebel angels from heaven is firmly established by all but the early illustrations of the scene, that bridges to hell are frequently represented in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, that pleached alleys in gardens were formed by interweaving the branches of plants in such a way that the bark gave a sensation of brownness, as in the 'alleys brown' of Paradise Regained 11.293, and that the fire which devours the sacrifice of Abel in Paradise Lost XI.441 is universally represented in painting even though no scriptural justification exists for this method of indicating the divine approval of his sacrifice. Illuminating visual parallels are discovered for such subjects of importance to the epics as the appearance of Satan...