Deux anges, armés d’épées flamboyantes, sont commis à la garde de la vallée et en défendent l’entrée contre le serpent

Flaxman’s drawing from canto 8 combines the angels who guard the valley at the beginning of the canto with the serpent they chase away at the end. Flaxman, in a black-and-white medium, cannot depict the color of the two angels, “Green as the tender leaves but newly born,” nor does he choose to render the fire of their “flame-illumined swords,” but he does exquisitely capture the feeling and the form of that “vesture . . . which, by wings as green / Beaten, they drew behind them, fann’d in air” (8.26-30). As for the self-absorbed serpent easily routed by these “celestial falcons” at the end of the canto, Flaxman appears to depict that split-second just before, “Hearing the air cut by their verdant plumes, / The serpent fled” (8.105-06). Flaxman’s handling of the valley the angels are guarding, and of the serpent’s spatial relation to its topography, is decidedly abstract.