The Mystical Drawings of William Blake
Reviewing the book: ‘Dante’s Divine Comedy: The Complete Drawings’
I’ve always loved Blake’s paintings, and in fact, that’s what I associated him with the most, more than his poetry. I was delighted to see this in a Lisbon bookshop, which illustrates Blake’s paintings for the Divine Comedy. I didn’t know Blake did paintings for it, and I haven’t even read Divine Comedy. However, I’ve always had a fascination for these classical texts that have shaped our culture, so it has always been a wish of mine to read Dante at some point in the future.
For those unfamiliar with Divine Comedy, it’s an Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri in the 14th century, one of the greatest works of world literature. If you ever heard about “levels” of hell, this is where that idea comes from. You might have seen it represented in Botticelli’s painting “Plan of the Inferno”.
The story describes Dante travelling through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The book offers a little introduction about the author, his work, and how both are placed historically. It also gives a small summary of the whole Divine Comedy narrative, which was very helpful since I only knew the very basics. This is, of course, highly simplified, but good enough to have an overview upon which to place Blake’s paintings into context.
It also gives an introduction about Blake as well, both in general as a painter and more specifically the paintings he did for Divine Comedy. Blake was obsessed with the work and learned Italian from scratch at the age of 70 just for the purpose of reading the text in its original form. He received a commission to illustrate Divine Comedy from Linnell, part of a group called the “ancients”, who admired Blake as a new prophet of new art while most of his peers dismissed him. He ended up producing 102 drawings during 1824–1827.
These introductions take roughly 60 pages, which I found perfect. Afterwards, the book moves on to a catalogue of the drawings, and this occupies the rest of the book for the following 400 pages. The structure of how the drawings are presented is incredibly well done and always consistent. You have a high-quality, full-page plate on the left page, with text about that plate on the right page. It first has a direct quote from Divine Comedy about what the drawing is about, followed by a short commentary about what is happening in the story at the time, plus commentary about the art element of the painting itself. I found the commentary very insightful and yet easy to read, often just taking a dozen lines or so.
I really enjoyed this structure, and I don’t think it could have been more perfect. The images are incredibly high-quality, and the amount of commentary was ideal. Enough that I felt like I understood the image and put it in context regarding the overall work, but also not so much that allowed me to still feel like I was mostly enjoying Blake’s genius as if I was visiting a museum and checking each painting one by one. In addition to the structure mentioned, with some paintings (and a fair bit of them), instead of moving on to the following one as you turn the page, it had an additional plate but this time covering the entire 2 pages. Often the previous image of only one page was cropped into the most significant part of the image, which allowed even more detail and also avoids unnecessary repetition just for the sake of a greater size.
It’s one of the books I most enjoyed reading. Despite its size, it reads very quickly as it’s mostly filled with paintings. I really appreciated how much text and commentary there was, which allowed me to learn a fair bit about Divine Comedy. When I finally read it, it will likely be much easier to read, and I will be able to understand more of it.
There were a couple of things I disliked about the book, however. The first is that most images are from Hell. Not many from Purgatory, and very little from Paradise. Second, there were a lot of unfinished paintings, which I could never enjoy nearly as much as the finished ones. I guess it makes sense to include them to make it a full compilation of Blake’s work, but there is a huge difference between artworks. Although both aren’t the fault of the authors of the book as there was nothing they could have done about it, nevertheless was slightly disappointing.
The book itself, physically, is also incredibly beautiful and high-quality. It’s of my favourite books I own, and I predict part of the ones that will hold up the best in many years. It’s also surprisingly cheap for its quality. You can get it for about 25€, and I would easily pay much more for it. If you like Blake’s paintings or Dante’s work, I highly recommend it. It’s incredibly well done in every possible aspect.
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