Doré's illustrations for John Milton's Paradise Lost, published in London in 1866 by Cassell, Petter, and Galpin (the same year as his Bible series), gave him the opportunity to engage with the biblical narrative of the Fall through an entirely different literary and theological lens. Where the Bible shows the serpent tempting Eve, Milton's epic builds a vast architecture of Satan's motivation, his war in heaven, his fall, and his deliberate decision to destroy what he cannot possess. Doré's Satan Surveying Paradise is the visual center of this project.
The Engraving
Satan stands on a high rocky promontory, his immense figure silhouetted against a sky of vast depth. Below and in front of him, Paradise stretches out in radiant beauty - a world of rolling hills, rivers, trees, and light, everything lush and luminous that he has left behind and can never regain. Satan's posture is not triumphant. He is not gloating. He stands in what might be called a posture of anguished contemplation: powerful, isolated, and looking at something he will spend the entire epic working to destroy, not because it is ugly but because it is beautiful, and beauty is now his torment. His wings, partially visible, mark him as still angelic in form though fallen in will. He is alone on the promontory. No other figure shares his vantage.
Biblical and Literary Context
Milton roots his Satan in biblical imagery from multiple sources. Isaiah 14:12-15 provides the Helel ben Shachar ("morning star, son of the dawn") whose ambition was to ascend above the clouds and be like the Most High. Ezekiel 28:11-17 contributes the exalted being who was in Eden, perfect in beauty, until iniquity was found. Revelation 12:7-9 adds the war in heaven and the defeat of the great dragon. Genesis 3 supplies the actual mechanism of temptation. Milton synthesizes all of this into a single character of enormous scope - the most complex antagonist in English literature - who is fully aware of what he has lost, fully aware of what he is choosing, and who continues to choose it because pride will not permit submission.
Paradise Lost Book IV contains Satan's famous soliloquy upon first seeing Paradise: "Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; / And in the lowest deep a lower deep, / Still threatening to devour me, opens wide, / To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven." This is the passage Doré's image visualizes - the moment when Satan sees the beauty he has forfeited and the beauty he is about to corrupt.
Doré's Interpretation
Doré makes a choice that Milton scholarship has noted as a major artistic risk: he makes Satan sympathetic. Not approved - the image does not endorse what Satan is about to do - but understandable. The solitary figure on the high rock, looking at what he cannot have, speaks to any human experience of excluded longing. This sympathetic reading of Satan was controversial in both Milton's time and Doré's, but it corresponds to what many readers actually experience reading Paradise Lost Books I-IV, before the explicit corruption of Eve redirects sympathy.
The world of Paradise below is rendered in a different tonal register from Satan's rocky promontory - lighter, more open, suggesting a luminosity that is the visual opposite of the deep shadows where the fallen angel stands. Satan is in his own darkness; Paradise has its own light. The contrast is compositional theology.
Technique
The scale of the landscape required Doré to manage two very different types of space in the same image: the specific, detailed rock on which Satan stands, and the vast, hazy, receding beauty of Paradise below. The transition between these registers - from dark, craggy foreground to luminous, atmospheric middle distance - is one of the engraving's most technically successful passages. Satan's figure, in silhouette against the sky, needed to read as both physically massive and spiritually isolated. The wings were indicated through strong organic curves that suggest power contained rather than deployed.
Comparison with Other Depictions
William Blake's illustrations of Paradise Lost include his own famous Satan figures - more abstract, more symbolically charged. Blake was interested in Satan as a principle of energy and rebellion; Doré is interested in Satan as a person experiencing loss. John Martin's large oil paintings dealing with Miltonic subjects influenced Doré's sense of scale. Henry Fuseli's Satan illustrations for Paradise Lost (1802) are more theatrical and less contemplative.
Cultural Impact
Doré's Paradise Lost illustrations arrived in 1866, the same year as his Bible series, and the two projects together defined his reputation as the supreme visual interpreter of sacred literature. The Satan figure became particularly influential in 19th-century Romantic and Decadent literary culture, where the sympathetic rebel angel was a recurring archetype. Doré's specific visual vocabulary for Satan - massive, winged, isolated, gazing at what is lost - influenced a century of literary and artistic treatments of the adversary.
Legacy
The image continues to circulate as one of the defining visual representations of Milton's Satan. It appears in literary editions of Paradise Lost, in academic studies of Romantic Satanism, and in popular culture treatments of the fallen angel archetype. The compositional logic - solitary dark figure against a luminous landscape, power shadowed by loss - has been adopted and adapted across countless subsequent artistic treatments of the adversary as a figure of tragic grandeur.