Albert S. Roe, Blake’s Illustrations to the Divine Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.
Call number: NC 233.B5 R6 (Main Library)
Case 2: “Illustrations of the Divine Comedy and its Legacy Throughout the Centuries”
In 1824-25 Blake’s patron, John Linnel, commissioned the artist to illustrate Dante’s poem, just after the artist had completed his engravings for Illustrations for the Book of Job. A close friend of Johann Heinrich Füssli (aka Henry Fuseli) and John Flaxman (see The Divine Comedy (H.F. Cary) in this exhibit), Blake had been exposed to Dante’s work through its long tradition of illustrations. Since the could not speak Italian, he studied it and in a few weeks was able to read Dante in the original language, relying on Henry Francis Cary’s translation in English (see Dante’s Inferno (H.F. Cary), The Divine Comedy (H.F. Cary), and The Vision or Hell, Purgatory and Paradise (H.F. Cary) in this exhibit). Because he died within two years of undertaking the project, Blake never published his series of illustrations, which were left at various stages of completion, from sketched-out drawings to completed watercolors. T.S. Eliot called Blake’s creative and imaginative powers “a continuous phantasmagoria,” referring specifically to his visualization of the first canticle. According to William Butler Yeats in William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy, “William Blake was the first writer of modern times to preach the indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol. […] A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame” (p. 116). Blake’s watercolors and drawings are, in fact, intellectual interpretations and visionary transformations of Dante’s work, and not simply its illustrations, which is what makes Blake’s art innovative and different from the tradition before him.
This book collects a hundred and three illustrations by Blake, corresponding to the hundred and two designs that he realized for Dante’s work (specifically, seventy-two for Inferno, twenty for Purgatorio, and ten for Paradiso) plus a portrait of Dante. A detailed description and commentary with references to the original text introduce the book’s illustrative section. The exhibited page (p. 69) shows Lucifer in his traditional representation as a three-headed being gnawing condemned souls.
p. 69, Lucifer