In Folio: Rare Volumes in the Stanford University Libraries

JOHN MILTON, 1608-1674.

Paradise Lost. A Poem in Twelve Books ….

The Fourth Edition, Adorn'd with Sculptures.

London: Printed by Miles Flesher, for Jacob Tonson, 1688.

The fourth edition of Paradise Lost, this is the first illustrated and first folio edition. It features seven illustrations by J. B. Medina (1659-1710) and one by Bernard Lens (1659-1725), with four being anonymous. This edition began a very rich tradition of illustrating Milton; editions in the eighteenth century would feature a wide variety of artists’ renderings of the scenes from this, the greatest epic in the English language. It is not surprising that Milton attracted the best of illustrators, including Sir James Thornhill (1675-1734) and Louis Chéron (1660-1725), whose illustrations for the 1720 edition were rendered in the French Classical style, in contrast to Medina’s Baroque style. Other eighteenth-century illustrators include Francis Hayman (ca. 1708-1776), a prominent English decorative painter whose 1749 edition’s illustrations were reproduced well into the nineteenth century; Henry James Richter (1772-1857), whose illustrations, issued in 1794, are distinctive in their emphasis on landscape; and the Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), with his haunting images published in an 1802 edition.

Jacob Tonson (1656-1736) stands as one of the great figures of English publishing of his time. He acquired the copyright to Paradise Lost (at this time the publishers bought and sold copyrights—rights to copy, that is, "to print") and sold far more copies of Milton’s text than had earlier publishers.

Medina, as the first to illustrate Paradise Lost in print, was faced with a difficult task: to portray Satan in a way more visually interesting than the traditional goat-like medieval devil. Medina succeeds (as seen in the image on the wall, above), by creating a beautiful, vibrant, youthful angel in the first stages of degeneration: the feathery wings ravaged, horns newly-sprouted, hair becoming tangles, but a creature still fair of face, an angel in metamorphosis. No illustration of Satan is so well-known, and no illustration better captures the sense of degrading change. By the end of the eighteenth century, Satan could be seen as "sublime" in some illustrations, in the aesthetic sense that Edmund Burke (1729-1797) would assert, in which sublime is powerful and awesome, as distinguished from the beautiful.

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