The ethics of personification in Milton, Rembrandt and Vermeer (John Milton, Johannes Vermeer)

In the introduction a close reading of the first sentence of Paradise Lost argues that prosopopoeia is a form of efficient causality in Aristotelian terms. Vermeer's Allegory of Painting illustrates the way that a subtle detail can change an admission into an accusation, or a description into a warning.; Chapter one finds prosopopoeia and personification in Areopagitica , following a discussion of exegesis in Christian Doctrine . For Milton rhetoric can have a logical meaning, syntactical links between words can depend on rhetoric, and intent can diverge from expression.; Chapter two makes an analogy between Satan's soliloquies and Renaissance paintings of the Fall by Michelangelo and Rubens. In the soliloquies to the sun and to hell, the grammar of evasion undermines the rhetoric of confession.; Chapter three focuses on the soliloquies of Eve, Milton and Adam, finding pictorial parallels for the first two in Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance and Rembrandt's Self Portrait of 1658. There can be no apt illustration for Adam's clear confession.; Chapter four argues that seduction succeeds and warning fails when either speaker describes an abstraction as if it were human. Emblems and anamorphoses illustrate this distinction.; Chapter five claims that prosopopoeia alters the course of the elaborate and morally significant similes in the poem. Three pictorial analogies illuminate the gordian knot that similes pose for the reader. Saskia as Flora reveals a difference between thematic and stylistic comparisons.; The conclusion finds dramatic irony in Milton's grammar and in Rembrandt's late paintings.