William Blake's Illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy : A Study of the Engravings, Pencil Sketches and Watercolors

623 Pages·2015·13.8 MB·English

by  Blake

William Blake’s Illustrations
for Dante’s Divine Comedy
A Study of the Engravings, Pencil
Sketches and Watercolors
Eric Pyle
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
2
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE
AVAILABLE
BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE
AVAILABLE
e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-1702-2
© 2015 Eric Pyle. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
formor by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopyingor recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system,without permission in writing from the
publisher.
On the cover: William Blake, Capaneus the Blasphemer, pen
and ink and watercolor, 1824–27 (National Gallery of
Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1920 [997-3])
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
3
Table of Contents
Preface
Part I: Blake, His Masters and Rivals
1. Why Did Blake Illustrate The Divine Comedy?
2. Views of Blake’s Dante, Past and Present
2. Part II: English Dante
3. The Comedy Reaches England
4. The Making of Blake’s Illustrations
3. Part III: Blake’s Criticism of Dante
5. Marginal Note to Boyd
6. Remarks on the Illustration to Hell, Canto 4
7. “He could never have Builded Dantes Hell”
8. States, Not People
Color Illustrations
4. Part IV: The Illustrations
4
9. Hell
10. Purgatory
11. Heaven
Conclusion
Chapter Notes
References
List of Names and Terms
5
God Appears & God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of day
—Auguries of Innocence
6
Preface
Dear Sir
I am still far from recoverd & dare not get out in the
cold air. Yet I lose nothing by it Dante goes on the
1
better which is all I care about—William Blake
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or
the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to
fulfill them.—Matthew 5:17
No thing can become manifest to itself without
2
opposition—Jacob Boehme
Among William Blake’s last works was a series of
illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy. It was an ambitious
project for a man of 67 to begin, and he didn’t live to
complete it. Even in its unfinished state, however, the series is
a rich and fascinating work of art that can add to our
understanding of Blake’s philosophy and artistic goals, and be
enjoyed for its strange beauty. The seven engravings from the
set approach the same high quality as the more famous prints
depicting the Book of Job, which were finished about the time
that the Dante series was commissioned. In addition, we have
102 unique pencil sketches and watercolors, in various stages
7
of completion. Some are merely rough outlines, but a few are
paintings of such beauty that they rival the best of Blake’s
visual work. Many of them are rich in iconographic
invention—enough to give us confidence that, true to form,
Blake was not passively depicting Dante’s words, but was
engaged in intellectual and artistic dialogue with his Italian
peer.
The only full-length analysis of the Dante series was
3
published in 1953 by Albert S. Roe. Since that time,
references to Blake’s Dante illustrations in the works of other
scholars have tended to rely on Roe’s interpretation and take
4
his conclusions as more or less settled. Although Rodney M.
Baine and David Fuller published articles in the late 1980s
questioning some of Roe’s opinions and calling for new
5
analysis, no thorough reinterpretation has appeared so far. It
is my hope that the present book will reopen many of the
questions about these pictures, point to new methods of
interpreting them, and help them to gain a place in lists of
William Blake’s greatest accomplishments.
My analysis will focus largely on aspects of Blake’s theology
that are at odds with Dante’s, and that moved Blake to
illustrate the Comedy as a way of correcting or completing its
message. We will see that Dante, true to his age, conceives of
God as existing in a separate realm, far above our fallen
world. Blake does not accept the idea of a God that is apart
from mankind. Indeed, for Blake it is the false perception of
separateness from God that is at the heart of so many of our
woes.
This book also discusses Blake’s views on the goals and
possibilities of art, an aesthetic theory that derives in large
8
part from his theological principle that God and man are not
divided. Whereas Dante accepts the traditional Christian view
that limited human reason is inadequate to understand God,
and that human language lacks the power to describe Heaven,
Blake sees such an admission as an unnecessary falling-short.
The true prophet, for Blake, is a poet who makes God
manifest, either in words or in pictures. Blake rejects Dante’s
repeated claims that human art is inadequate to show God’s
full majesty and works to realize in fullness the message that
the Italian poet found impossible to convey.
Earlier interpretations of Blake’s Dante pictures, following
Roe’s analysis, saw the entire series as an attempt to show
that the Comedy is false and that Dante’s theology was
inherently flawed. My book, on the other hand, will show that
there are major points of agreement between the two poets. It
is primarily in Dante’s final inability to manifest God that
Blake sees a failure. Blake’s illustrations, then, were not made
to abolish the Comedy, but to fulfill it.
I am of course aided in my task by the 60 years of
advancement in the field of Blake studies since Roe’s book
appeared. Even a much abbreviated list of those who have
published since 1953 would have to include Kathleen Raine,
George Mills Harper, and Desiree Hirst, who have revealed to
us the esoteric and Neoplatonic background of Blake’s
thought. The British antinomian roots of his methods have
been unveiled by E.P. Thompson. W.J.T. Mitchell showed us
the inseparable nature of Blake’s visual and verbal art, while
David Erdman revealed its politics. Kathleen Lundeen
brought Blake criticism up to date in regard to the world of
semiotics and language theory. A fascinating triad of books
has helped me understand the interplay of philosophy and
9
theology that separates Blake’s world from Dante’s: Fischer,
Magee, and Punter have, respectively, written books about
Blake and Jacob Boehme, Jacob Boehme and Hegel, and
Hegel and Blake. Robert Essick, author and editor of many
key works of Blake scholarship, read portions of this
manuscript and rescued me from several errors. I am grateful
for his help. As much as I would like to blame any remaining
errors on Satan, I must take personal responsibility for them
here.
My goal in this book has been to discover the main artistic
and theological aspects of Blake’s engagement with Dante. In
staying close to that theme, I have chosen not to attempt an
exhaustive catalog of every Dante-related work in Blake’s
oeuvre. For a complete list of such works the reader is
referred to the online Blake Archive, at
www.blakearchive.org. This resource provides color
reproductions of all the works discussed in the present book,
as well as additional information on the provenance and
present whereabouts of each. An inexpensive collection of
reproductions is available from Dover Publications, titled
William Blake’s Divine Comedy Illustrations: 102 Full-Color
Plates.
I am grateful to Professor Takao Aoki of Hiroshima
University for assistance in securing the reproduction
permissions necessary to complete this book. Sachiko and
Aiko Ohnishi supported me in ways too numerous to name. I
would also like to thank a number of pseudonymous friends
with whom I conversed on the Internet, who provided me
with moral support and valuable feedback during my years of
research. And of course this book could not have been written
10