[PROGRAM LISTING NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] & His Two Sons Satan & Adam
2002; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2330-118X
Autores Tópico(s)Moravian Church and William Blake
Resumo1 SOME TIME IN 1815 AN OBSCURE ARTIST AND ENGRAVER CAME TO THE Royal Aacademy's antique school for the purpose of drawing from a cast of the Laocoon group, in preparation for an engraving he had been commissioned to make. Henry Fuseli, Professor of Painting and Keeper, recognized an old friend. Why! Mr he said, you a student! You ought to teach us! Alexander Gilchrist, who had this anecdote from Blake's much younger friend Frederick Tatham, continues: took his place with the students, and exulted over his work ... like a young disciple; meeting his old friend Fuseli's congratulations and kind remarks with cheerful, simple joy. (1) However cheerful William Blake may really have been in doing this commercial job, he produced at least two drawings of the Laocoon, and then an engraving that was, with three others by Blake, published illustrating John Flaxman's article on sculpture in Abraham Rees's The Cyclopaedia; or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature. (2) The drawing that has survived (3) corrects the position of the right arm of the younger son, bending it back over the figure's head in a manner similar to that of the second restoration that would be completed in 1960, and the stomach muscles of the father are more contracted than in the Royal Academy cast that Blake copied (or in the original it was taken from). (4) The stippled line engraving that Blake produced for The Cyclopaedia was first published in 1816. Doing this work evidently put him in mind of the Laocoon as a possible subject for one or more of his own works. One of these was a large pen, pencil, and watercolor drawing that Martin Butlin has dated as being stylistically close to the Dante illustrations of 1824-27 (no. 681, 1: 489-90). The bearded central figure is fully clothed, unlike the one in the Laocoon sculpture, although his garment is, as so often in Blake, diaphanous, revealing the body beneath. Again unlike the sculpture, his mouth is opened in a cry. His two sons, more lightly sketched, are on either side of him, almost of the same height as each other. His left foot, emerging from his gown, has been outlined and the toes delineated in pen and ink. Perhaps not all bearded patriarchs in Blake's works are to be identified with Urizen, but the anguished expression and the prominent left foot of this figure (compare Urizen's left foot in the frontispiece to Europe) make such an identification likely here, as Keynes suggests (33-34). The fact that the serpents tower over the figures and that the central figure is crying out suggests that the subject is Virgil's description of the scene in the second book of The Aeneid. In Dryden's translation, this reads in part: We fled amaz'd; their destin'd Way they take, And to Laocoon and his children make: And first around the tender Boys they wind, Then with sharpen'd Fangs their Limbs and Bodies grind. The wretched Father, running to their Aid With pious Haste, but vain, they next invade: Twice round his waste their winding Volumes rowl'd, And twice about his gasping Throat they fold. The Priest thus doubly choak'd, their crests divide, And towring o're his Head, in Triumph ride. With both his Hands he labours at the Knots; His Holy Fillets the blue Venom blots: His roaring fills the flittering Air around. Thus, when an Oxe receives a glancing Wound, He breaks his Bands, the fatal Altar flies, And with loud Bellowings breaks the yielding Skies. (5) Blake may have begun this drawing in opposition to eighteenth-century aesthetic theories which, as we shall see, praise the Laocoon sculpture precisely because it did not express extreme pain or other violent emotion. He did not, for reasons unknown to us, complete his large drawing; but he had not yet done with the subject of the Laocoon. Near the very end of his life Blake printed at least two examples of a large separate plate combining a reproductive engraving of the Laocoon group with a welter of aphorisms. …
Referência(s)