Artists Illuminating Milton’s Gendered Instant of Creation

Abstract

‘Immediate are the acts of God’, the archangel Raphael tells our ‘first parents’, Adam and Eve, in book 7 of Paradise Lost, ‘but to human ears | Cannot without process of speech be told’. Milton’s illustrators faced an analogous but opposite challenge to that of his angel narrator: to represent the birth of time in spatial terms, through various moments selected out of a temporally related creation. While John Baptiste Medina (1688) simply privileged literal human chronology, later artists began to emphasize Raphael’s paradox of instantaneous process. In so doing, they also began to discover the poet’s ecstatically gendered conception of the universe. Notable visual interpretations include John Martin’s luminously gendered creation of light (1825–8), as well as visual renderings by Carlotta Petrina (1936) and Mary Groom (1937) that likewise foreground Milton’s careful delineation of the ‘two great sexes [which] animate the world’.