The English poet, painter, and engraver,
William Blake (1757-1827), was an admirer of both the Gothic style and the art
of ancient Greece. For Blake, Gothic art was an expression of personal
religious emotions,
while the
figures of ancient Greek art embodied the mathematical and the eternal in their
perfect proportions.
In 1820, Blake made an engraving of the
Laocoon, working from a cast
in the Antique School of the Royal Academy. He transformed the figures of
Laocoon and his sons when he gave his engraving the complex title, "Jehovan and
his two sons, Satan and Adam, as they were copied from the Cherubim of Solomon's
Temple by three Rhodians and applied to Natural Fact of the History of Illium."
This unusual description of the sculpture
is explained by phrases that he engraved around the image, which say such things
as: "The Gods of Priam are the Cherubim of Moses and Solomon, the Hosts of
Heaven," "Spiritual War: Israel delivered from Egypt is Art delivered from
Nature and Imitation," and "Art can never exist without Naked Beauty Displayed."
As an artist, Blake often employed
Michelangelesque figures in his works, so we should not be surprised at his
study of the sculpture that so profoundly affected the Renaissance artist.
But in renaming his figures and surrounding them with text, Blake
expresses a hostility toward the classical past and the endless attempts to
resurrect it that were characteristic of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Neoclassicism.
