On April 27, 1667 the blind and impoverished John Milton sold the copyright for Paradise Lost for £ 10. The poem concerns the Biblical story of the Fall of Man by the fallen angel Satan. The first edition of Paradise Lost was published in ten books with over 10,000 lines of verse.

The first illustrations to accompany the text of Paradise Lost were added in the fourth edition of 1688. By this time, the poem had been divided into 12 books rather than ten with one engraving prefacing each book.

Eight of the 12 engravings were executed by John Baptist Medina. This image is his depiction of The War in Heaven, Book Six. It is a faithful photographic representation of a two-dimensional public domain work of art and is therefore public domain.