William Blake. Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’. The Complete Drawings.

William Blake. Dante’s ‘Divine Comedy’. The Complete Drawings. 

Authors: Sebastian Schütze. Maria Antonietta Terzoli. 2017. 464 pages.
Book description:

Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy (completed in 1321) is widely considered the greatest work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature. On the surface, the poem describes Dante's travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven; but at a deeper level, it represents the soul's journey towards God. In the last few years of his life, Romantic poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) produced 102 illustrations for Dante's masterwork, from pencil sketches to finished watercolors. Like Dante's sweeping poem, Blake's drawings range from scenes of suffering to light, from horrifying human disfigurement to the perfection of physical form. While faithful to the text, Blake also brought his own perspective to bear on some of Dante's central themes, introducing his own elements of understanding to such vast ideas as sin, guilt, punishment, revenge, and salvation. Today, Blake s illustrations, left in various stages of completion at the time of his death, are dispersed among seven different institutions. This new edition brings the images together once again, alongside excerpts from Dante's masterpiece, in a stunning pairing of two of the finest artistic talents in history. Also included are an introduction to the Divine Comedy and an analysis of Blake s illustrations."

Dante running from the three beasts

Opinion:

William Blake transformed more than a hundred sketches and watercolors, and some copperplate engravings, into a distinctive interpretation of Dante's immortal trilogy. Also, that Blake worked in poverty and obscurity during his life, and despite everything, today, he is recognized as one of the most sublime artists and poets in the English-speaking world.

It should be mentioned that the commission came from his patron John Linnell, who asked him to do the illustrations for the Book of Job, in 1825, and paid him 130 pounds sterling for the whole work. The drawings were not published at the time.

The expressive line and vivid colors of William Blake's watercolors permeate the scenes and their subjects, endowing them with pathos, terror and pity, which at the same time provoke a mixture of luminous joy.