Global Milton and Visual Art ed. by Mario Murgia and Angelica Duran (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Global Milton and Visual Art ed. by Mario Murgia and Angelica Duran
• Matthew Dolloff

Murgia, Mario, and Angelica Duran, eds. 2021. Global Milton and Visual Art. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. $96.65 hc. 432 pp.

Two of the significant challenges facing literary studies are how to maintain the relevance and vitality of canonical authors such as John Milton in an increasingly diverse classroom and how to generate new and innovative research on authors who have been studied for centuries. Global Milton and Visual Art provides at least partial answers to both by showing us how visual art can facilitate “engaging new admirers” in “expanded editorial contexts” (Murgia and Duran 2021, 233) via research from both veteran and budding scholars. It is an encyclopedic study of Milton’s poetry through “paratextual narratives” (2021, 201) ranging from book sculptures and paintings to stained glass, music videos, and even “culinary portraits” (141). Some 103 illustrations grace the pages of this fifteen-chapter, 432-page study of the “highbrow,” “lowbrow,” and “nobrow” (148) with an additional sixty-four supplemental web-based images. It is a wonder that Milton, who in his early career was such an iconoclast and who later went blind before composing Paradise Lost, should be the source of so much visual representation. As Duran and Murgia point out (15), the Book III invocation asking “celestial Light” to “Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers/Irradiate, there plant eyes” is a fitting introduction to their project.

The book is divided into four parts containing multiple chapters, the first titled “Panoramas.” In Chapter 1, Murgia and Duran state [End Page 130] their thesis, “advancing the appreciation of the presence, aesthetic appropriation, and reinterpretation of the works and legends” of John Milton (2021, 4), before giving us a preview of the essays to come. In Chapter 2, Joseph Wittreich argues that in the Romantic period, global translations of Milton’s poetry and the “feverish illustration of it” coincided with a “revitalization and secularization of Milton’s mythologies” (22) that expanded William Blake’s seminal eroticizing of Paradise Lost. His examples include two relatively unfamiliar artists from Italy and France, Francesco Zucchi and Anne-Marie Du Bocage, one of the few women treated in the volume. These and other Romantic recastings produce “new Miltons” (57) in the modern literary economy.

Part II, “Cameos,” features three essays that, in quite different ways, pertain to perhaps the most famous illustrator of Paradise Lost, Gustave Doré. The first chapter is Hiroko Sano’s study of the influence of Japan’s great artist of the ukiyo-e genre, Katsushika Hokusai, on Doré and other European artists. At the center is Hokusai’s well-known “Under the Wave off Kanagawa” that evidently was worthy of imitation after the fashion of Japonisme. Duran takes us to Spain and then Mexico, where echoes of Doré can be discovered in the “chromo” or chromolithography images in twentieth-century popular translations of Paradise Lost as well as Bibles and calendars reminiscent of what Duran identifies as Mexicanidad. Ana Elena González Treviño’s research brings us to the present day with an analysis of how Doré’s depictions of Paradise Lost have inspired music videos by Pink Floyd and the EDM band, Delta Heavy, which contain distinctly video game-inspired imagery.

Part III, “Textual Close-ups,” reveals the true diversity of genres through which Milton and his poetry have been reinterpreted, and as Wendy Furman-Adams observes, “each new visual reading is a new translation” (Murgia and Duran 2021, 26). Nathalie Collé takes us on a wild journey across several unexpected portraits of Milton the man: food, ivory, postage stamps, and more. She asks us to consider why readers of Milton are so drawn to his likeness even though the history of his portraiture is “very complicated” (2021, 143). Furman-Adams focuses on Milton’s Eve in artistic renderings of Paradise Lost beginning with the earliest illustrated edition of 1688. Most original is her discussion of twentieth-century female artists Carlotta Pertrina and Mary Elizabeth Groom in whose works the Modernist aesthetic is evident. The idea of an “ecofeminist Eve” can help us interpret Milton’s Paradise with increased...