Is Art "nice"? Art and Artifice at the Outset of Temptation in Paradise Lost.

Ann Torday Gulden

There are several reasons for stopping to look at the details of the scene in Book 9 where Eve is happily gardening alone, just before her temptation begins. She has worked hard to get there, and she appears to be surrounded by some interesting flowers, specifically chosen. Moreover, the sight of her has the astonishing effect of stopping the devil in his tracks, making him "stupidly good, of enmity disarmed" (9.465). At this crucial moment of discovery Satan is unable to summon up any evil at all. His purpose is momentarily confounded. I believe that Satan is arrested by more than sensual rapture, and that the iconography of this scene has more than decorative significance. Here is an interesting hiatus in the dramatic action which deserves close investigation. Eve is creatively and artistically engaged, and the scene shows a cunning interplay between art and artifice.

Although "nice art" is not specifically mentioned in the passage to be considered in this essay, it becomes, as a notion, increasingly prevalent as thematic backdrop to the compelling Satanic design which gradually impinges on Eve's innocent gardening schema. Moreover, "nice art" persists as an essentially tricky idea wherever it is represented, either through word or deed. The word nice is variously glossed in the OED: it indicates refined tastes, discrimination, precision, accuracy, danger, uncertainty, and attentiveness to detail, which counterbalance the glosses such as foolishness, wantonness, and indolence. There is no unequivocal meaning even in this brief word in the epic: no nice judgement is possible.

In the postlapsarian state, art is not nature. Nature is the true product of God's Creation. Humanity may only try to imitate nature through art. Daston and Park trace, as the first text to air this problem, Aristotle's Physics, where the distinction between art and nature is observed to rest on the fact that artificially constructed objects have no "innate impulse to change": they can neither develop nor reproduce themselves. "Only natural objects can constitute true species or kinds characterized by internal principles of change and faithful reproduction" (Daston and Park 263-64). Following this line in his book Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature, Edward Tayler writes of the tradition that "Art corrupts the pristine integrity of nature" (37). Milton's text problematizes this dogmatic view: in Eden art and nature are interdependent. Art is not an simple issue in Paradise Lost. Isabel MacCaffrey observes that "Milton's references to art are frequently pejorative; the flowers of Paradise are the products, not of 'nice Art,' but of 'Nature boon' (iv.241-42)" (MacCaffrey 161). And Roy Flannagan notes, "the word art is almost always associated with the Black Arts or the kinds of dissimulation practised by the fallen angels in Paradise Lost" (105). On the other hand, Milton's text appears to endorse the idea of "Nature as the Art of God [as] a commonplace even before Dante," as Tayler notes with reference to Thomas Browne's Religio Medici (185). Robert Fludd's "The Mirror of Nature and the Image of Art" of 1617 shows, as an example of this commonplace, that God is "the final cause of nature. The chain of command, as we say, is perfectly clear. Art imitates Nature, and Nature is the Art of God" (Tayler 2). Furthermore, Thomas Browne's view that "Nature is not at variance with Art, nor Art with Nature, they being both servants of his Providence . . . In brief, all things are artificial; for Nature is the Art of God" (Tayler 32) certainly complicates the view that art is necessarily a manifestation of human misguidedness or idolatry. As Roland Mushat Frye points out,

Though Milton's descriptions drawn directly from nature are often extraordinarily effective, the principal analogues to the subject matter he treats in the epics are to be found in the visual arts rather than in nature. It is the arts which have enabled the mind of man to "see" the supernatural, and the arts which have stocked the mind with images for envisioning the principal incidents of Paradise Lost. (7)

Several critics recognize the influence of art on Milton; Frye quotes both Arnold Stein and Helen Gardner thus:

In his readings of Milton, Stein refers us not only to nature but also to art. [. . .] he notes that "the traditional descriptio rei of Renaissance rhetoric was associated with painting" and points out how Milton in his descriptions "arranges depths and chiaroscuro" so that "the final effects may approximate those of painting." In a similar vein, Gardner writes that "we read Paradise Lost best if we read it in the spirit with which we look at great Renaissance paintings. " (17)

May all the traditional scepticism about art as an unnecessary (or optional) adjunct to nature be applied to [End Page 17] the prelapsarian state of Eden? Surely art is innocuous there, an integral part of paradisal bliss. This would seem to be the case, for the phenomenon of Milton's Eve at work immediately prior to the Temptation makes a visual impact on both Satan and reader which is far from derogatory.

In this essay I will suggest that an emblematic reading of the scene may be a viable alternative to the comparison with "great Renaissance paintings," which often allow unwarranted space to the old misogynist allegories. Reading the passages in the context of the emblem tradition reveals new interpretations which bridge the gaps between art and artifice. Emblems, although themselves often allegorical, are more precise in that they show image and text combined, in complementary parts separated by a frame and a space. Their symbolism is fairly explicit. In Paradise Lost the connection between the solitary Eve and the emblem is established in the description of her bower, where "underfoot the violet, / Crocus, and hyacinth with rich inlay / Broidered the ground, more coloured than with stone / Of costliest emblem" (4.700-03). This passage contains the only appearance of the word emblem in the poetry, and the same passage contains, moreover, the only occurrence of broidered, which is close, both etymologically and semantically, to the embordered of the passage to be discussed in this essay. Eve is as yet unfallen while she gardens alone, and she demonstrates a development of her powers of creativity, previously seen when she "decked first her nuptial bed" (4.710) with flowers and aromatic herbs and, subsequently, when she decked the dinner table for the archangel Raphael before also strewing the floor around it with "roses and odours from the shrub unfumed" (5.349). When creating her garden, Eve builds on previous experience, developing earlier skills. Consequently, it seems to me that both her art (her work) and the art she represents (the image she presents in the text), are artless here. Satan espies her as a visionary figure he cannot immediately claim for his own purpose, but the reader is uncomfortably aware of the inevitable outcome of the Temptation, throughout. However, Eve can look after herself for the time being, and it is worth dwelling on the momentary reprieve from that inevitable fatal outcome, a reprieve offered by the text in the description of Eve at work, as she stands as yet unimpeded by contrary influence. The application of flower and color symbolism to a reading of the scene adds new meaning, as I hope to show. Furthermore, Satan's unique use of the word "Empress" with which he flatteringly addresses Eve, suggests an element of art in the related concept of the impresa.

The textual fragment which gives rise to this essay is as follows:

         Eve separate he spies,
Veiled in a cloud of fragrance, where she stood,
Half spied, so thick the roses bushing round
About her glowed, oft stooping to support
Each flower of slender stalk, whose head though gay
Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold,
Hung drooping unsustained, them she upstays
Gently with myrtle band, mindless the while,
Her self, though fairest unsupported flower,
From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh.

(9.424-34)

It is not inconceivable that Eve, inspired by the significance of Raphael's plant metaphor, began to design this private garden when she left the dinner-party scene in Book 8. ¹ The figure of Eve in her garden, surrounded by the boundaries of flowers "Embordered on each bank" (9.438) which are as concerned with design as with practicalities, works as a perfect counterfoil to satanic art, and is thus sacrosanct. However, the designed garden may appear to be better suited to the Chelsea Flower Show than to the uncontrived harmony of Eden. Has Eve now ceased to be useful, wasting time on an ornamental garden instead of dutifully clearing the paths with Adam? On the other hand, if Eve's solitary state is reprehensible, why, then, is she shielded by flowers whose coloring suggests iconography which is, in our sense, very "nice" indeed?

In this last vivid scene of unfallen industry, Milton's text, describing nature in artistic terms, either painterly or emblematic, deconstructs the divisive dichotomy between art and artifice. The paradise garden substitutes "a natural expansiveness and variety" for "the formal regularity of most seventeenth-century gardens, whether in Italy or in England" (Frye 6). Nonetheless, order does prevail until the Fall. Far from clouding issues such as innocence and sin, moderation and excess, sufficiency and insufficiency, as Herman Rapaport claims, with his interpretation of Eve as a marginalized "criminal syntax that destroys dialectical economy" (69) leading to loss of meaning, in my reading Milton's Eve has things well under control. She stands in her private garden where, as Turner notes, she "has planted, watered and raised selected species during her infrequent departures to garden alone" (288). The selection of species in this episode is noteworthy, as I will show in what follows. [End Page 18]

Recapitulating the way in which "nice art" is presented in Book 4 indicates how the idea changes throughout the epic. In the first description of the river meandering through Eden, the text is ambivalent about the reliability of art, as in "if art could tell, / How from that sapphire fount the crispèd brooks, / Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold, / With mazy error under pendant shades / Ran nectar" (4.236-40, my emphasis). Its mazy error is innocent, for not a trace of cloudiness obscures the waters which "Ran nectar." In the earlier Book, the epic privileges the natural over the artistic, or artificially constructed, but a clear distinction between the two is harder to find later. Eve is "yet sinless" as she stands gardening alone in Book 9, and yet she has used "nice art" to contrive a quite specifically designed garden.

Before beginning the close reading, one question to be cleared is the extent to which Eve's gardening can be regarded as art, since the word "art" is not specifically used to describe it at this point in Book 9. The twelve occurrences of the word "art" in Milton's poetry are all negative. Satan, for example, reaches into the imagination of the sleeping Eve, "Assaying by his devilish art to reach / The organs of her fancy" (4.801-2). But in the garden scene, their next meeting, Eve is awake, and is herself being artistic. "The hand of Eve" is honored at several places in the epic. Eve produces, for example, a well-chosen feast for Raphael, and she decorates the nuptial bower with roses. But Eve's "art" is most highly developed, indeed almost apotheosized, in the scene under consideration here. In this hiatus before the Fall, not only belief and disbelief are suspended, but also time. For time seems to stand still, as still as in a picture. The figure of Eve, which persists into the postlapsarian state, is developed throughout the epic as a latent rather than as a graven image. Like a photographic image, it increases in definition and resolution under the influence of continually regenerative powers, both natural and artistic.

Eve's gardening achievements, the colors of the flowers with which she is specifically associated, and the flattering interpolations of the serpent as he approaches his goal, all contain material which complicates any clear distinction between art and artifice. Art is "nice" in that it is contrived, but it is also, particularly in this scene, a manifestation of Eve's God-given ability to create out of the Creation. Perhaps Eve innocuously uses "natural magic" here, a concept which, freed from necromancy, during "the sixteenth century [. . .] stood as a descriptive term on the borderline between a mystical Paracelsan alchemy involving a supposed communion with the hidden forces of nature, and a more modern conception of scientific effort," as Kitty Scoular observes (4). Scoular defines the scope of natural magic broadly across a long tradition, from the young Pico's view of it as "a power over the hidden forces of nature, giving apparently miraculous results and uniting any virtue in the earth or sky," to views such as Bacon's in The Advancement of Learning (1605), that "natural magic [harnessed] nature for the practical benefit of mankind" (Scoular 4). Both these views are applicable to the scene under discussion.

Scoular writes of the Renaissance expression

of cosmic abundance through the description of a symbolic figure as through the description of a landscape; [. . .] frequently this figure was given a representative garment. The elaborate robe or veil expressive of the character or function of its wearer is one of the favourite descriptive subjects in epic and romance literature [. . .] The robe, too, might convey the idea of the imaginative concealment of truth for the further illumination of it. Sometimes it was the quality of accommodation of higher truths to a simpler level which received emphasis. (Scoular 23-4, 25)

Eve's "robes" are represented by the flowers surrounding her, and they are truly expressive of both her character and function. Furthermore, the apparent simplicity of her flowers, as one of the many significant devices in the epic, may be seen imaginatively to conceal "the truth for the futher illumination of it," in that they set off the figure of Eve both visually and symbolically. Thus the "accommodation of higher truths" becomes a possibility.

Correspondingly, Satan's gaudy coils stand out in gross contrast to the simple grass so perfectly suited to the other animals, which "on the grass / Couched, and now filled with pasture gazing sat" (4.350-51). Satan, having usurped the serpent, levitates with no grassroots attachment, "on his rear, / Circular base of rising folds, that towered / Fold above fold a surging maze, [. . .] that on the grass / Floated redundant" (9.497-99, 502-3). He does not quite manage to move like the serpent in that he floats above the ground, thus flouting the Creation. His attempts to gain the attention of Eve by visual effect, however fabulous, are unsuccessful. He is the epitome of artifice as he floats around her, bowing and scraping, whereas Eve, in contrast, is close to the "thick-woven arborets and flowers / Embordered on each bank" (9.437-38), safe where she stands. The serpent is not [End Page 19] only distracted by Eve's goodness and beauty, but "abstracted stood / From his own evil" (9. 463-64), literally deflected from his purpose. "Stupidly good, of enmity disarmed" (9.465), he is brought to a state of satanic disorder by the sight. He must recollect to himself the hate staggered by the presence of Eve. His thoughts, like the "yelling monsters that with ceaseless cry" (2.795) constantly re-invade the womb of their mother Sin, noisily, excitedly and uncontrollably express their devilish vitality from within him. Thus Satan must gather in his hatred, which has been dispersed by the sight of Eve: "Fierce hate he recollects, and all his thoughts / Of mischief, gratulating, thus excites."(9.471-72). Such travesties of nature are the worst manifestations of "nice art," miscreated as they are.

Milton's Eve has far more interesting qualities than do the more conventionally decorative graces in gardens, as Donald Friedman has pointed out, noting "the developing moral experience of Eve as she comes to understand, through choice and action, both what she is and what she is meant to be." Milton redefines the classical topos of the lady in the garden. Friedman argues that Milton uniquely combines "in his figuration of Eve [. . .] the generative potentialities of the classical goddesses and the Marian symbolism of the hortus conclusus" (123). He describes Eve's function in relation to the Creation, her

intimate relationship with vegetable nature, which responds to her by fulfilling its own inherent form, and which she commands by bringing order and design to instinctive forces of growth and creativity; she both represents and embodies the sensuous capacities of human experience, and is thus tutelary to artistic expression and creation. (126)

Friedman's exposition is similar to Diane McColley's. McColley, however, extends her observations of the close integration of unfallen humanity with its environment in Eden, by following its invitation to imagine a continuation of unfallen Eden: "would any temperate art or science be closed to them? [. . .] Would all arts be ephemeral, every day a new page to be filled with new inventions of poetry, music, dance, play and enhancement of the beauty of growing things? [. . .] Would they enjoy the decorative arts Eve initiates[. . .]?" (McColley, A Gust for Paradise 189). One is led to believe so, for Eve is preoccupied with her art in this scene, and her Garden is in order.

All that shields her at this moment are the rose-bushes, their veil of perfume, and the cultivated strips "Embordered on each bank, the hand of Eve" (9.438): the substantial signs of her industry. In the OED the word embordered is glossed as both embroidery, and borders: this is Eve's creative work and it is not trivial. ² In seeking to "redress" the Garden (9.219), which contrasts with Adam's instructions to "reform" it (4.625), "the hand of Eve" produces fine effects which are also functional. Eve appears in a frame of reference which she herself has constructed, redressing the balance as she works. The sufficiency of Eve alone is seen in the use of the word "stood" (9.425), which recalls her having been created as "sufficient to have stood" (3.99). McColley notes that "if Eve had exercised her sun-clad powers, she might have done more than stand. She might have been a conduit of grace to others confronted by Satan--perhaps even to Satan himself" (Milton's Eve 189). I would suggest that she is just that, particularly in the scene in question. Carol Barton observes that the ability "to stand" in Milton's poetry is dynamic rather than static, as the lines "There stand, if thou wilt stand; to stand upright / Will ask thee skill" (PR 4.551-52) make clear. Barton writes that "in any struggle, it takes the steady exertion of a force equal and opposite to that of one's assailant simply to maintain apparent stasis, but the seeming motionlessness of such sustained resistance is [. . .] by no means the same as actual inertia" (117). Eve cannot predict her impending struggle, but the use of the phrase "as she stood" in the passage under discussion connotes the uses of the verb "to stand" described by Barton. Eve is, in my reading, a dynamic rather than a static figure, and as such she is "a conduit of grace" for she disarms Satan, albeit briefly, aided as she is by the natural magic of her garden.

Eve's flowers are more than decoration or an illustration of Satanic rapture. They have a deeper significance than James G. Turner's description of them as being "like the hearts in comic strips" (261). Associated with Eve throughout the epic, the rose is a "highly complex symbol; it is ambivalent as both heavenly perfection and earthly passion" (Cooper 141). Its symbolism is further explained as

love, life, fertility, creation, beauty . . . . The evanescence of the rose represents death, mortality, sorrow . . . . The Rose Garden is a Paradise symbol and is the place of the mystic marriage, the union of opposites. The rose is wisdom and the rosarium the Work; it is also the rebirth of the spiritual after the death of the temporal . . . The white rose is innocence, purity, chastity, the Virgin Mary. (Cooper 141-42) [End Page 20]

These interpretations of the rose forge the link with Milton's Eve. In the prelapsarian state the rose is eternal. As Milton's "chief flower" it occurs more frequently in his texts than does any other flower (McHenry 95). Like Eve, the rose, the first flower to show mortality, is manifested in Milton's Eden as symbol of perfection, albeit a temporary perfection.

Eve is partially shielded by the roses which seem to screen her of their own volition, as the active verbs "bushing round," and "glowed" (9.426,7), indicate. She stoops to support the drooping flowers with which she is identified by both narrator and critics, unsupported as she appears. But all gardeners must stoop: Eve is hard at work in her "nurserie" which is also a garden of love. The Parlement of Foulys, a textual parallel to the erotic aspects of this scene, has a similar garden where the narrator describes "flouris white, blewe, zelwe & rede" (186) which bush around the languishing female beauty, in Chaucer's text merely a passive object of the narrative gaze in a way Milton's Eve is not (Chaucer 76). For there is more to this Edenic scene than eroticism. The colors of Eve's flowers make clear her proleptic association with Mary, mother of Christ, who is most often dressed in robes of the colors carnation, purple, azure, and gold in Renaissance paintings. And, as Fowler notes, purple, azure and gold are the colors of Minerva, "the virgin goddess," who is also the goddess of wisdom (Fowler 463; see also Grimal 275). So it is not easy to dismiss as only suspect, the complex textual allusions to art in the description of the colors and flowers surrounding Eve, who holds the satanic stamp in check for a while.

The colors "Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold" (9.429) are listed in accordance with the convention in Renaissance art of regulating "the relative splendor of hues" to the subject matter. For example, as Baxandall notes, when the painter "Gherado Starnina followed his instructions to use two florin blue for the Virgin and one florin blue for the rest of the picture he was accenting a theological distinction" (Baxandall 82; see p. 11 for a description of the differences in blue pigments). However, the cost of the most eye-catching pigments used to depict the most important figures, in "blues made from lapis lazuli or reds made from silver and sulphur" (Baxandall 83), is not the only reason for examining the symbolism of the colors listed here. The "colours which give back light, [such as] orange, yellow, red, are active, warm, advancing;" and "those which absorb light, e.g. blue, [and] violet, are passive, cold, retreating" (Cooper 39). Eve shows both active and contemplative qualities in Paradise Lost, and thus, the colors listed in line 429 do have thematic relevance. However, there is more to the verse line than a list of colors, as I will proceed to show.

The word carnation, placed initially in the verse line, takes on the resonance of the noun although it appears overtly as the adjective (red) at this point. Its association with the flower itself is unavoidable in the context of the flower garden, and elements of unfallen artifice are implicit in the first introduction of this particular flower at this crucial point in the narrative. The carnation was one of the first flowers to be artificially bred in various colors and forms. It is as if the text announces, with the introduction of the carnation at this point in the drama, the impending demise of nature through human manipulation. As "gay / Carnation," however, it may be understood as lively, joyful, bright and showy, according to the OED glosses for "gay." But the OED gloss 2a mentions "dissipation" and thus the fallen world approaches ever closer.

The carnation was tremendously popular from Elizabethan times throughout the seventeenth century, often used by the thousand to deck ceremonial halls, and it was grown in many colors--white, red, pink, yellow and orange (Bille 48-53). ³ Carnations, or "honesties," were often used as love tokens. When used to describe the red flower, carnation connotes "admiration, marriage, passionate love; the pink represents the tears of the Virgin Mary, hence motherhood." ⁴ The "white is pure love and the yellow, rejection." Milton's Eve experiences both pure love before the Fall, and rejection after it. Moreover, the word carnation is possibly an aphetic form of incarnation, which supplements its other meanings: a pink, flesh-like color, and the flower itself. Mary, the second Eve, will give birth to the Son incarnate. Furthermore, the original word for pink, which also refers to the gillyflower, or carnation, is coronation, which indicates the sovereign status of God alone. The concepts of incar nation and coronation provide metatextual links, it seems to me, between Milton's Eve and the Virgin Mary, links which strengthen and supplement the more overt textual allusions.

In Milton's poetry, the word carnation occurs only twice: at this point in Paradise Lost and in An Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester, in the description of "her carnation train." I would suggest that the appearance of the carnation at this point in the epic narrative, just prior to the Temptation, is particularly appropriate because it symbolizes the indistinction between art and artifice by its very "nature." The flower itself was "scorned by Perdita" in A Winter's Tale (4.3), as "one of several flowering plants early modern gardeners cultivated into [End Page 21] showy varieties not originally found in nature" (Daston and Park 262). As Perdita presents her winter bouquet of rosemary and rue to Polixenes, King of Bohemia, she says "the fairest flowers o'the season / Are our carnations and streak'd gillyvors, / Which some call nature's bastards: of that kind / Our rustic garden's barren; and I care not / To get slips of them." Notwithstanding Polixenes' assurance that "This is an art / Which does mend nature--change it rather: but / The art itself is nature," Perdita remains unconvinced, and impresses the king by her botanical expertise: "nothing she does or seems / But smacks of something greater than herself," he concludes rightly, as it turns out. The same applies to Eve. So the carnation, a natural product of art and artifice, proleptically gives cause for unease as well as admiration. The unsullied beauties of nature in prelapsarian Eden thus show increasing signs of their future condition, although as yet unfallen. Art and artifice are inextricably entwined with nature itself. This complicates the emblems of simple mutuality and interdependence such as Fowler, amongst others, observes when writing that "Eve's supporting the rose with myrtle thus signifies the sustaining of felicity by virtue" (Fowler 494).

As for the other colors surrounding Eve, purple is the color of royalty, but also of pride, by which Eve is infected during the Temptation. The underworld threatens in that purple is "the colour for ritual services of underworld divinities." But Tyrian purple also signifies "the highest glory," and in the Christian tradition, truth, humility, and penitence (Cooper 40), virtues which characterize Eve later in the epic. Thus, the single word "purple" reaches both forward with its fallen connotation of pride, and then further forward still, to its celestial connotations which point to the redemption itself. Along similar lines, the color "azure" meant more to Renaissance specialists than it does to ordinary readers today. This particular blue, whilst indicating the color of the sky, signifies both the feminine principle and the Queen of Heaven. Blue conveys the sense of "Truth; the Intellect; revelation; wisdom; loyalty; fidelity [. . .] peace; contemplation" (Cooper 40), all of which are central issues under threat in the scene of the temptation. Gold appears as the last color on the list, but sparingly, in consonance with Alberti, who abhorred bad taste, writing in his influential fifteenth-century treatise on painting, that "painters [. . .] use much gold in their pictures because they think it gives them majesty; I do not praise this . . . to represent the glitter of gold with plain colors brings the craftsman more admiration and praise" (Baxandall 116). ⁵ MacCaffrey notes that "As for gold, Milton saw it most often with medieval eyes, as something unfruitful, and so belonging to death [. . .] gold, outside the safe circle of Heaven, is more often destructive or barren than profitable" (161). ⁶ Gold anticipates the forbidden fruit. Thus, the few words which seem merely to describe the flowers with which Eve works, illustrate both her symbiosis with her Garden, and its thematic significance through color symbolism.

This episode is the last moment of carefree happiness in the epic, enjoyed by the solitary Eve at work, "mindless the while" (9.431), and certainly mindless of the wile of the serpent. For Satan's trick of addressing Eve as "Empress" (9.568, 626) is certainly wily. He alone uses this word in all of Milton's poetry, as an exaggerated compliment containing both the stamp of his divisively hierarchical thinking, and the hallmarks of artifice. Satan is out of order in his construction of the link between Eve and himself. The word "empress" suggests idolatry, but if it is a pun on impresa, the idolatry is somewhat un dermined. This complicates Stevie Davies' view that Satan, in calling Eve "Empress," overtly creates "a kind of consort to [his] Emperator role, an empress who follows the course of evil and is subject in a way that she cannot conceive" (211).

Compounding this by using more covert flattery hidden in a pun, moreover, the serpent makes a show of defining Eve as the epitome of the created world, cast in the role of empress but also bearing the impress of God, as "Fairest resemblance of thy maker fair" (9.538). In Satan's ambiguous address, the figure of Eve alone in the garden becomes emblematic, in that empress is so closely linked both semiotically and etymologically with the im presa. Michael Bath notes that impresas illustrated "a just proportion and analogy between body and soul, by which Giovio means the picture and the motto" (Bath 130, 138-39). The OED in a source from 1711, however, distinguishes a little differently between emblems and impresas thus: "Though emblems and impresas sometimes seem like the other [. . .] the words of the emblem are only placed to declare the figures of the emblem; whereas, in an impresa, the figures express and illustrate the one part of the author's intention, and the word the other." ⁷ The etymological link between empress and im presa is to be found in the OED gloss (usage now obsolete) for empress which reads "It. impresa of same meaning . . . a motto or significant device." The examples given by the dictionary are clearly pictorial, as is Milton's own use of the word at the outset of Book 9, where he mentions "tilting furniture, emblazoned shields, / Impreses quaint, caparisons and steeds" (9.34-35). The links between Milton's pictorial text and the impresa [End Page 22] become stronger. Despite the fact that, in the passage from Book 9 in Paradise Lost, we have words only, these are expressed in such a way as to render any distinction between text and pictorial image redundant. The text carries its own imagery: none other is strictly necessary. ⁸

So in conclusion I would argue that Eve's emblematic integrity prevails over Satan's artifice at the outset of his onslaught. His use of empress with its punning emblematic association has little effect on her, and it serves to depersonalize his attack to some extent. This is fitting since Eve is solely the means to an end, having no intrinsic value for him beyond her being a pawn in his own satanic designs. But he cannot, at first, appropriate Eve into his own device: the garden, created by her own industrious art, protects her as long as she remains within its boundaries. I would suggest that in constructing her garden boundaries, Eve seeks to put into practice the repeated admonitions of Raphael which stipulate the need to limit human enquiry to what her "happy state / Can comprehend, incapable of more" (5.504-05). Eve's boundaries constitute a microcosm, or even an artistic mimesis of the boundaries of Eden itself. However, whereas Eden is surrounded by "one continued brake" (4.175), with only one gate, Eve's self-made boundaries are more conceptual than physical, manifested as herbaceous borders and perfumed roses, through which it is perfectly possible to retain a clear view.

Here as in many parts of Paradise Lost, this short scene provides a depiction which can be understood both rationally and visually. Whether or not art is "nice" must remain a moot point, for the epic text itself is the prime example of the problems raised by the term "nice art," in the sense that it is a carefully contrived masterpiece at the same time as it purports to be divinely inspired. However, the mimetic text which manifestly sets out to "justify the ways of God to men" (1.26) allows the figure of Eve, in turn, the opportunity to exercise mimesis through her own industrious and artistic creativity. Moreover, the seamless connection between thematic and artistic devices such as the close links between the first and the second Eve, illustrated by the application of color, permits a glimpse of a more powerful and far better equipped figure of Eve than is to be found elsewhere. The Fall is, in consequence, all the more tragic.

Oslo University

Acknowledgements

This article was developed from part of a dissertation chapter, then given as a paper at the Sixth International Milton Symposium at York, July 1999. My thanks go to those who contributed with constructive criticism throughout, from Margaret Kean, Olav Lausund, Roy Flannagan, and David Gay, to Diane McColley most particularly, whose suggestions gave rise to new ideas. Thanks go also to the Birkeland Trust in Oslo for supporting my work financially.

Notes

1. The second reason given by the narrator for Eve's departure from this scene, that she prefers to learn from Adam, his teaching interspersed with kisses, is indeed a secondary explanation. Eve learns by direct experience throughout much of the epic.

2. The first gloss for embordered in OED is from 1530. "The crampons [of the bed] were of fyne syluer enbordered wyth golde." The second is the line under discussion here. The third is from 1736, "imbordered, bordered, having borders." I would suggest that the word can be understood to point both ways for present purposes.

3. In addition to the more common pink or white carnations, Bille notes the orange and yellow varieties sold in Vienna in the sixteenth century. Carnations were very popular flowers in the Renaissance, and were most fashionable in the seventeenth century.

4. The painting "A Virgem, O Menino E Um Anjo" (1504), by Eduardo, o Portuguez in the Museum of Antique Art in Lisbon, is one of many examples: the Madonna holds pinks in her left hand.

5. Alberti's treatise On Painting, 1435, is "the first surviving European treatise on painting, and it seems to have circulated particularly among humanists interested in painting or geometry or good plain prose" (Baxandall 116-17).

6. Milton uses gold only sparingly in his descriptions, e.g., the fish, which "Show to the sun their waved coats dropped with gold" (7.406), and the insects which "In all the liveries decked of summer's pride / With spots of gold or purple, azure and green" (7.478-79). The simple dignity of the naked Adam is compared favorably to "princes, when their rich retinue long / Of horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold / Dazzles the crowd" (5.355-57). Good things need no over-adornment.

7. OED "impresa, now obsolete, quoted from Drumm. of Hawth., Disc Impresas Wks. (1711) 228." The authorial intention must remain a moot point.

8. Yet another OED definition of the word impresa (2) refers to text only, "the sentence accompanying an emblem; hence, a motto, maxim, proverb."

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