The greatest of Lucifer’s sufferings arises from his envy of the Prince, who is all that is wise and lovely: a learned theologian, legislator, philosopher, physician, logician, astrologist, mathematician, architect—“witness the palace of the world”—geometrician, rhetorician, musician, and poet.
But none of these qualities so enrages and astonishes Lucifer as the Prince’s talent for painting. He has already been engaged six days on a landscape. At the beginning the ground of the canvas was so bare and rough that he only drew on it the outline in shadowy figures. The first day he gave it light; the second day he introduced heaven and earth, dividing the waters and the firmament; the third day, seeing the earth so arid and bare, he painted flowers in it and fruits, and the fourth day the sun and moon. He filled, the fifth day, the air and waters with birds and fishes; and this sixth day he has covered the landscape with various animals.
Nothing of all this astonishes Lucifer so much as the Prince’s intention to embody in a palpable form the ideal which was the cause of Lucifer’s fall.
The divine Artist has himself chosen the colors and selected clay and occult minerals, which Lucifer fears a breath may animate: “Since if a breath can dissipate dust, I suspect, I lament, I fear, that dust may live by the inspiration of a breath.”
Animated by this fear, Lucifer has summoned Sin to aid him in destroying this image, so that the Prince may be The Painter of his own Dishonor.
A palace appears, and near the entrance the painting on an easel. Lucifer and Sin retire; for the Artist, accompanied by the Virtues, comes to put a careful hand to his work.
Sin knows not where to conceal herself. Lucifer bids her hide in a cave in the bank of a stream.
Sin answers that she is afraid of the water, because she foresees that it is to be (in the water of baptism) the antidote to sin.
The flowers, grain, and vine all terrify her, before which, as symbols of some unknown sacrament, she reverently bows.
She at last conceals herself in a tree, which Lucifer calls from that moment the tree of death.