The Figura Serpentinata in Paradise Lost

Abstract:This essay links the Mannerist figura serpentinata to the figure of the serpent in John Milton's Paradise Lost. The figura serpentinata depicts human forms in twisting, upwardly spiraling poses in order to convey man's moral and spiritual growth through dynamic physical realism. I argue that Milton draws on the figura serpentinata in order to develop a poetics of becoming that links wandering, twisting figures to the dialectic between creation and learning through which humans and the created world ascend up the great chain of being as they gradually increase in perfection. This shape—figured through the language of wandering, error, turning, and other serpentine phrases—constitutes nothing less than the defining shape of prelapsarian ontology and knowledge.