Niram Art Magazine

Raymond Lister too focuses his discourse on the Blakean technique of printing, emphasizing the aquatint-like effect which, quite unexpectedly, it seems, the process brought about. His observation is important because it can be partly applied to the artist’s illuminated manuscripts: ‘The technique of transferring the design to the paper in a press imparted a rich granulated effect, reminiscent of aquatint; this feature is characteristic of much of Blake’s colour-printing and is present also on some pages in his illuminated books which were sometimes similarly coloured’ (13).

Dabundo’s Encyclopedia of Romanticism offers a detailed description of Blake’s method of relief etching, holding that the artist’s technique is in stark contrast to the intaglio relief technique, as a traditional craft. Further important, albeit technical, details are furnished, so that her demonstration may be complete: ‘In Blake’s method of relief etching, he applied a ground only to the areas of the copper plate where the actual lines of the design would emerge from the surface of the plate. Text and design are painted on the plate using a solution impervious to acid’ (60).

Blake’s paintings are defined, in my opinion, by an ascensional craving: characters frequently appear in the guise of dancers whose primordial element is air, and whose only obsessive goal is reaching the above.[i] This contributes decisively to the visionary character of his pictorial works of art, in that it succeeds in establishing a communication between the transcendental and the transcendent, between the world of contingency and that of Eternity – the depicted heroes essay to leave the ground just as Blake’s geniuses conquer their limited perceptions and exercise them with a view to attaining the ultimate degree of vision.[ii] I should also point out that Blake’s paintings as representations of visions are set in contrast with Joshua Reynolds’s, the latter urging his contemporaries to ‘beautify’ the heroes in art, so as to instil a feeling of sublime in the audience. Nevertheless, this desideratum is not matched by a radical aesthetic stance, but by a moderate, bourgeois telos, educational in nature and limited in scope to moral exemplarity. Blake, in his turn, has no need for character-modification: he claims that he renders them as close to the reality of his visions as humanly possible.

In the end, as Damrosch, Jr. notes, Blake’s pictures ‘are “read” in traditional pictorial terms, and the problems of interpretation which they raise are less radical than those of Blake’s language and form’ (349), which implies that it is his literary work which must be looked into more carefully.[iii] However, all these examples show that, although ‘read’ in traditional terms, Blake’s visual works of art bring into focus a significant number of original elements which may enable one to interpret them in the light of the artist’s verbal mode of representation, and under the auspices of visionary construction. Blake’s creative process and his manner of expression cannot be accounted for satisfactorily in the absence of a brief pictorial analysis. It must also be remembered Blake’s works are somehow interconnected, and that a key to one automatically provides a key to another. Saree Makdisi is a case in point when he advises that ‘[...] if we try to read one of the illuminated books as a self-contained object, we will almost inevitably be frustrated. We will have greater success if we try to read it as a part of a virtual network of relations that opens away from it and undermines its autonomy’ (130). Concurrently, he adds the ‘principle of iterability and repetition’ (simultaneously technical and hermeneutic in form) to the critical equation: ‘The figural reiteration of images between works in Blake is inextricably related to the material reiteration of images among versions of the “same work”’ (129). Up to a certain degree, this reinforces my idea, inspired by Goodman’s distinction between descriptions and depictions, that verbal and visual representations are brought together, each borrowing certain modes of expression from the other. Only if Blake’s books are ‘read’ in toto can they be properly reflected upon and comprehended, without thereby subverting their visionary message.