Le Dante aperçoit sur des bas-reliefs l’image de celui qui, créé plus noble que les autres mortels, fut précipité de cieux avec éclat

Flaxman choses from canto 12 the first of the thirteen figures whose sin of pride had caused the fall of each to be carved on their tombstones across the wide expanse of the first cornice: Satan. Flaxman’s title Lucifer, like his drawing and the appended poetic fragment, calls attention to the “heavenly rebel hurl’d / Like flaming thunderbolt”—a muscular figure whose clenched fists add greatly to the force of his precipitous fall. Flaxman’s 1793 drawing of Satan shows how he has assimilated Michelangelo and Raphael in Rome and was to anticipate Blake in London.

In the facial expression and outstretched arms of the other plunging prideful figure on the lower right, Flaxman anticipates several of Rockwell Kent’s forms in the 1930 Random House edition of Moby-Dick. Along the long diagonal on the right, the spread-eagled sinner in the wake of the foremost sinner makes for a complex visual space intensified by the contrasting lines of force that suggest not only Satan’s “lightening fall from heaven” but also the “mortal ice-stroke” of the “bolt celestial” that “pierced” Briareus, the fallen Titan whose “giants’ limbs” joined those of Satan and others “Strewn o’er the ethereal field” (12.22-29). As Robert Rosenblum has noted, “the vertiginous cosmic descent is rendered through pictorial means that almost anticipate futurism.” Flaxman “rends his symbolic spaces with abstract torrents of crisscrossing lines whose acute angularity even transforms the anatomies of the figures on the right into lightning-like bolts of rushing movement” (170).

Réveil's French title for the plate stresses not Lucifer himself but all those who, believing they were more noble than other mortals, were dashed down from heaven with “éclat.” Flaxman’s drawing dramatizes the immediacy of the plunge more than the fixity of the stone figures in bas-relief on the ground. Melville’s conception of the Mount of Titans in Pierre would therefore seem closer to Dante’s own depiction of the fallen Titans in canto 12 than to Flaxman’s drawing from the canto—unless you take Flaxman as representing not the precipitous fall itself but rather the active psychological imprisonment the fallen will eternally endure. On Melville’s Mount of the Titans, it is the psychological agony of the fallen, mountain-bound Encedalus figure that endures. In Flaxman’s drawing an abstact human form embraces the plunging figure at the lower right. I see this figure as Flaxman’s embodiment of that compassion “whose sacred stings the piteous often feel” when Dante’s “remembrance” is “waked” by “sights” such as these. Felt in this way, Flaxman’s abstract lines of force suggest not only the “lightening fall” and the “mortal ice-stroke” of Dante’s depiction but also his “streaming tears” (12.17-26).

Réveil gives much more definition than had Piroli to the figure embracing the figure plunging fatefully to the right, adding an ear that more clearly aligns the face, and giving much sharper definition to the knees. He also adds depth to Satan’s eyes and edge to his upper lip.