Divine imagery

CONTRARY to the persistent myth, artists are not generally ignored in their lifetime.

MUST CREDIT: SUPPLIED... William BLAKE Dante running from the Three Beasts (1824-1827) illustration for The Divine Comedy by...

CONTRARY to the persistent myth, artists are not generally ignored in their lifetime, left to starve in a garret and discovered only after their death. The case of Vincent van Gogh is almost single-handedly responsible for this misconception, although so many things about his career were atypical, including his late start, his very brief flowering far from the centre of taste in Paris and his premature death just as he was beginning to be recognised.

Most artists, in the past as in the present, have been recognised in their lifetimes, and rewarded more or less in proportion to their merit or at least their prominence within the dominant movements of their time. This is not to deny, however, that the reckoning of that merit can be revised in hindsight — both positively and negatively — or that some individuals have been relatively misunderstood, as we now see it, because their work and their sensibility were out of step with their time.

William Blake (1757-1827) was such an artist, underestimated in his lifetime, and yet not solely because of the obtuseness of his contemporaries. He was genuinely eccentric both in ideas and in style, and found his own form of expression in the margins of contemporary pictorial arts, indeed in a space of his own making situated between literature and art. Even today, there are few artists who can be so touchingly accessible in parts of their oeuvre — in such poems as The Lamb, The Tyger, The Sick Rose, or the hymn Jerusalem — and so stubbornly obscure in others, especially the turgid quasi-­religious visionary works.

In the perspective of history, however, he is one of the great figures of British romanticism, and the National Gallery of Victoria’s significant collection of his work, including both prints and drawings, represents in consequence one of the most important bodies of romantic art in Australia. The present exhibition reviews these holdings and publishes them in a handsome, well-researched and concise catalogue.

Blake hated the Royal Academy, founded in 1768, and despised its director Joshua Reynolds. His spiteful marginalia in a copy of Reynolds’s theoretical Discourses are well known. Yet they shared an admiration for the work of Michel­angelo, something more apparent in Reynolds’s writings than in his work, though evident in Blake’s muscular and — despite his criticism of the classical doctrine of idealism — highly idealised figures.

It is another irony that Reynolds earned his living as a portrait painter, far from the highest genre of painting in the hierarchy of academic theory, while Blake worked almost exclusively in the genres of history and allegory (often conflated in practice), although as a printmaker, this was always on a miniature scale.

There is a fortuitous connection to Australia in one of his early works, an engraving of an Aboriginal family after a drawing attributed to Philip Gidley King, in which the original, already a sympathetic depiction of indigenous life, has been further classicised into one of the most striking images of the Aborigine as incarnation of the “noble savage” idea so popular in the second half of the 18th century.

Blake’s first great works were the Songs of Innocence (1789) and the Songs of Experience (1794) in which he devised a new technique for printing his words and his images on a single plate. Although inscriptions could be painstakingly engraved into copper plates of portraits, for example, engraved images could not be printed at the same time as text in movable type, because the former requires a much greater pressure than the latter; woodblock illustrations, on the other hand, could be printed at the same time as letterpress.

Blake’s solution was to invent a form of negative etching: he would write the poem and draw the accompanying illustration on the copper plate in acid-resistant solution — all in reverse, of course — and then expose the plate to acid, which would eat away the remaining exposed areas. Thus while normal etching is an intaglio print, in which the ink is held in grooves etched into the plate, in this case both text and image stand in relief like a woodblock print. The resulting black-and-white illustration could then be hand-coloured in watercolour.

This was essentially the same technique used for the impressive but idiosyncratic imagery of the so-called Prophetic Books produced over the following years: Europe: a Prophecy (1794), The First Book of Urizen (1794) and Jerusalem (from 1804).

In later life, Blake was consistently supported by John Linnell, himself a distinguished and successful painter, who either commissioned directly or secured commissions for a number of very fine and quite different works included in the exhibition. One was a series of beautiful little wood engravings as illustrations to RJ Thornton’s The Pastorals of Virgil (1821).

Linnell also commissioned a set of watercolours for Milton’s Paradise Lost, of which two masterpieces are included here: Satan Watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve and The Creation of Eve (both 1822). And it was Linnell too who commissioned another of Blake’s greatest works, the series of The Book of Job (1823-26), which Blake executed in pure engraving technique, hand-cutting the lines into the copper plate without the use of etching and thus achieving an effect of great clarity and purity.

To all of these religiously inspired texts Blake brought his own ideas about true and authentic and joyful spirituality as opposed to conventional piety, and perhaps the greatest and most complex of all these subjects was another commission from Linnell, for a series of watercolour illustrations (1824-27) to Dante’s Divine Comedy: the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, a vision of the afterlife composed in the early years of the 14th century and set at Easter 1300.

Cathy Leahy, in the catalogue, explains the remarkable circumstances that led to a considerable part of this series finding its way to Melbourne: when the Linnell collection came up for sale in 1918, a consortium was formed between several British public galleries and the NGV to purchase the Dante set and save it from disappearing into an American collection. The Felton Bequest had given the NGV a more generous budget for acquisitions than any museum in Britain, and so Melbourne ended up with 36 of the 102 sheets, the largest single group which also includes many of the finest images.

The commission itself was part of the remarkable modern critical reception of what is undoubtedly one of the supreme works of European literature. Except in Italy, where he remained a literary and linguistic giant, Dante had been completely ignored in early modern Europe. Although in hindsight the humanism that infuses his work is perhaps even more conspicuous than that which we recognise in his contemporary Giotto, the subject of the poem seemed irredeemably medieval and “gothic” in the old pejorative sense of the term.

In the 17th century, for example, a French critic called Freart de Chambray could indignantly accuse Michelangelo of borrowing the figure of Charon in the lower right corner of his Last Judgment from ancient mythology; what he took as an example of gross impiety was merely a literal illustration of Inferno III, 109-111. Whereas the 16th-century Italian poets Ariosto and Tasso were avidly read all across Europe, Dante was simply unknown, and there was not even an English translation until that of Henry Cary in 1814.

Dante was thus, essentially, rediscovered in the romantic period as part of a broader reassessment of the medieval world and of a whole culture dismissed by the Enlightenment as irrational and superstitious.

And suddenly this author, who had been so foreign to the early modern period, seemed to speak to readers of the 19th century, inspiring countless works of literature and art, from Delacroix’s Barque of Dante (1822) to Rodin’s Gates of Hell (1880-1917). And the importance of Dante only seemed to increase in the 20th century, where, for example, he is a pervasive reference in the works of TS Eliot; the quintessential poet of the medieval world became simultaneously a touchstone of modernism.

One thing to bear in mind in looking at Blake’s illustrations is that the poem itself is for practical purposes his only source of inspiration. Classical and biblical subjects most often had a long-established visual iconography: they had been painted, engraved or sculpted for centuries and there were precedents, sometimes ancient as well as modern, for the representation of figures and the narration of events.

Blake was well qualified for his task, however, having himself already produced symbolic illustrations for his own allegorical compositions. He was far better able to imagine these subjects as visionary images than a later and more literal-minded illustrator of Dante such as Gustave Dore, whose attempts to represent the fantastic result in melodrama rather than ­significance.

The deeper problem of illustrating Dante, of course, is that, although the narrative is often vividly visualised, there are many things that cannot easily be pictured, like the similes that constantly bring the supernatural close to ­tangible experiences of earthly life, and above all the pathos of the words spoken within the poem.

These include the stories told by the souls encountered throughout the journey, and even the words spoken between Dante and his guide Virgil, like Dante’s first admiring address to the Mantuan — tu se’ lo mio maestro e ’l mio autore — or Virgil’s explanation of the souls encountered in the vestibule of hell.

Eliot borrowed them to be his crowd flowing over London Bridge, the men and women who have been followers but never taken responsibility for their actions and are thus equally banished from heaven and from hell. The passage is unforgettable as poetry but perhaps impossible to depict in painting.

More subtle still is Dante’s distinction, especially in Inferno, between the psychological and moral reactions of his autobiographical persona and the moral vision underlying the poem: thus Dante the character is overcome by feeling for the sufferings of Paolo and Francesca (Canto V) or his old teacher Brunetto Latini (Canto XV), but the poet’s conception of God’s justice excludes pity for those considered to have irredeemably broken his laws.

It is even harder to picture the conclusion of Paradiso when, in one of the most sublime passages in literature, Dante evokes the experience of beholding more than the human mind is capable of comprehending.

This passage too is recalled in Eliot’s “multifoliate rose”. But Blake does come close to an idea of the ineffable spiritual vision and religious ecstasy in the drawing of Dante adoring Christ (Paradiso XIV), with its frontal figure of Christ, the poet seen from the back and almost swooning, and the divine vision wreathed in flame-like washes of pure, transparent and ­ethereal watercolour.