In his iconic awakening in hell, Satan finds himself confined in a prison of total darkness. Despite the surrounding obscurity, Milton’sMilton, John lines vividly delineate the depths of the infernal abyss, its diabolical inhabitants, and the citadel they erect, bestowing upon the narrative of Paradise Lost a wealth of visual intricacies. But can darkness really be visible? The revival of epics from Milton’sMilton, John magnum opus to Dante’s CommediaAlighieri, Dante and Michelangelo’sMichelangelo Last Judgement concurred with a fascination for human experience suspended between life and death, the seeable and the unseeable, that is symptomatic of a particular moment in the cultural history of Britain. Alongside the epistemological ambition of natural history and empirical observation, the late eighteenth century instilled a palpable and pleasing anxiety about darkness and the human body whose examination lies at the heart of this book.