Le comte de Montefeltro raconte au Dante comment un ange l’arrache d’entre les mains du démon

Among those on the next ledge of purgatory, who repented in the split-second opened up by a quick and violent death, Flaxman depicts the moment in which the soul of Bounconte, the count of Montefeltro, is being delivered by the angel of God from the clutches of the devil, who will be left with his lesser part. In Bounconte’s words to Dante, “Me God’s angel took, / Whilst he of Hell exclaimed: ‘O thou from Heaven! / Say wherefore has thou robb’d me?’” (5.101-03). Flaxman’s angel holding Bounconte’s hands while bearing him heavenward is a type of Virgil leading Dante to the rational illumination that precedes the final transport of faith. Bounconte’s light, airborne foot passes over the darkly delineated posterior of the claw-toed, horn-headed devil, whose gaping mouth in Piroli’s engraving is run through by horizontal hatching in Réveil's rendering. 

Could Ahab, one wonders, have achieved a comparable deliverance if, in the split second after the flying line grabbed him by the throat, he had instantaneously embraced the repentance he had willfully turned from in “The Symphony?” As Ishmael gives us no access to any inner life Ahab might have had at that moment, our graphic imagination is invited to consider Fedallah’s “pinioned” body, tethered to the whale in the “turns upon turns” of “involuted” lines (NN MD 568), as the anti-Virgilian guide to Ahab’s infernal, internal demise.