Blake & the Gothic (2): Illuminations.
The mediocre watercolours and engravings of English medieval subjects hardly attest to Blake’s genius; but with his decision to create illustrated books of his poetry, his art reached a new level of accomplishment which ensured his posthumous fame. Of significance here is the word “illuminated” which might refer to enlightenment in a mystical sense, and Blake drew and painted many esoteric subjects like The Sea of Time and Space (above); but might equally, as Clark reasonably states, allude to the world of the middle-ages with its monks and illustrators of the illuminated manuscripts in scriptoriums which Blake saw as more important then the art of Greece and Rome.[1] Clark quotes Blake’s words: “Greece and Rome, so far from being parents of Arts and Sciences, as they pretend, were destroyers of all art. Grecian is mathematical form; Gothic is living Form; Mathematical Form is external in the Reasoning Memory; Living Form is External Existence.” Claims have been made between Blake’s images and the illuminated manuscripts. To give just one example: Blunt suggested that the St Michael subduing Satan is thought to be based on the Winchester Bible “which contains one initial strikingly similar in design.”[2] As well as medieval style, the language here is also Michelangelo-esque, but the energy of the high renaissance filtered through the “mannerist revival of Michelangelo and Tibaldi” which was brought back to England through Fuseli, all of which would fuel the imagination of Blake.[3]
[1] Kenneth Clark, The Romantic Rebellion: Romantic verses Classical Art, (John Murray, 1973), 152. As Clark memorably put it Blake “would have been more at home in an inward-turning scriptorium than in the life-class of an eighteenth-century academy.”
[2] Blunt, Art of William Blake, 33.
[3] Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art, (Penguin, 1956), 207.
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