In yesterday’s article, I looked at how William Blake’s late painted etching of The Ancient of Days isn’t what it seems, and tells a story unique to Blake’s personal mythology. This article looks an earlier work that until relatively recently was misidentified as a painting of Hecate.

According to Blake’s mythology, Enitharmon is partner, twin, and inspiration to Los, and mother of Orc. She is spiritual beauty, and her image here was most probably modelled on the artist’s wife Catherine. In The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (c 1795), she establishes her Woman’s World, with a false religion of chastity and vengeance, which is Blake’s view of the 1800 year history of the ‘official’ Christian church.

As the moon to the sun of Los, she is accompanied by symbols of night, such as the owl and bat. She also plays the role of Eve, which may explain the head of a snake peering out towards her. The donkey eating thistles underlines Blake’s rejection of the ‘official’ church, and the two figures behind Enitharmon face in and bow their heads in guilt. The book on which Enitharmon’s left hand rests is Urizen’s ‘Book of brass’, in which his repressive laws are laid down.

If you didn’t know Blake’s mythology, identifying her as Hecate seems reasonable.

Stéphane Mallarmé’s drawing of a classical sculpture of Hecate, Greek Goddess of the Crossroads was engraved for his illustrated account of classical mythology published in 1880. This is her most conventional representation: fully triple-bodied, holding a key at the left, and torches to the left and right, with a symbol of the moon on her forehead.

Hecate has also been depicted more like Eve with a serpent, as seen in Francesco de’ Rossi’s fresco of her from 1543-45. He hints at her triple body with the heads on which she is standing, and she wears a coronet of the moon, her association with night, hence with the owl in Blake’s painting.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau flies his owls in support of a personification of the mythical Night (1883), as do others painting similar motifs. But the owl is also famously associated with Minerva.

Hendrik Goltzius shows a classical and fairly complete set of her attributes in his Minerva (as the Personification of Wisdom) from 1611: the owl, her distinctive helmet, here decorated with olive leaves, a spear, books, and great beauty.

Blake’s mythology has an elaborate and sometimes opaque genealogy. Los and his emanation Enitharmon have children, the first of whom is Orc. As Los is spiritual revolution, so Orc is revolution in the material world. Orc hates his father Los in an Oedipus complex of love for his mother Enitharmon. As shown in Los and Orc (c 1792–3) above, Los is driven to bind Orc to a rock on the top of Mount Atlas, using the chain of jealousy. Orc’s limbs then become rooted in the rock, pinning him there. This cannot prevent Orc’s imagination from raging, though, and permeating everything.

One of the fundamental concepts in Blake’s mythology is that of pairings: there are many elements with both male and female counterparts, the latter being termed emanations. These might take the generation of Eve from Adam as their prototype. Nowhere does Blake envisage a pantheon of gods, but stretches the Jewish and Christian concepts of a single God, going far beyond the Christian Trinity. These include expressions of God associated with particular eras, such as the vengeful God of the Old Testament, and those of particular interpretations that Blake deprecates.

William Blake wasn’t the only artist in Britain at the time who painted new stories. Henry Fuseli did too.

Fuseli’s painting of Percival Delivering Belisane from the Enchantment of Urma (1783) shows a narrative that the artist had invented for this painting. It appears to be one of a series, although only one other work has been identified as part of that, and that is only known from a print of 1782. He also preceded this series with a single painting of Ezzelin and Meduna (1779), referring to another unique narrative, which doesn’t appear to have any associated works.

Fuseli provides the viewer with a rich array of ‘Gothic’ narrative elements to form their own account of the story. There are visions of faces in the distance on the left, chains leading to an unseen figure apparently manacled into a bed at the right, Percival swinging a sword above his head, to strike the cloaked figure of Urma in the left foreground, and a beautiful young woman, presumably Belisane, embraced by Percival’s left arm, kneeling on the floor.

References

Blunt, A (1959) The Art of William Blake, Oxford UP.
Butlin, M (1981) The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 02550 7.
Damon, S Foster (2013) A Blake Dictionary, the Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, updated edn., Dartmouth College Press. ISBN 978 1 61168 443 8.
Vaughan, William (1999) William Blake, British Artists, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 190 1.

One of the golden rules in narrative painting is to tell stories that the viewer is already familiar with, because of the limitations imposed by still images. By the middle of the nineteenth century, though, artists were breaking that rule in what became a new sub-genre of the ‘problem picture’, with open-ended narrative encouraging the viewer to construct their own stories. William Blake was a precursor to that in some of his paintings, and this weekend I look at two examples that try to tell stories we’re unfamiliar with.

At first sight, Blake’s painted etching The Ancient of Days from about 1821 might represent the Christian God seen as master craftsman, forming the world out of the darkness below heaven. That would be an innovative but hardly revolutionary interpretation of the opening of the book of Genesis.

That wasn’t Blake’s intention, though. This represents Urizen, one of many figures from his own mythology, and documented only in the artist’s writings. There, Urizen symbolises reason, his name most probably a semi-conscious pun on your reason. This painting shows Urizen the architect, creating the world using his compasses. He goes on to have the role of the jealous and vengeful god of the Old Testament, but his desire for dominion brings about his downfall into a state of Satan.

Representations of God as architect aren’t common, but Blake’s would be by no means unique.

This frontispiece to a Bible Moralisée from around 1220-30 shows the Christian God as architect, using his compasses during the creation of the world. The compasses continue in various modern symbols, including those that feature in freemasonry, and in its references to the Supreme Being as the Great Architect of the Universe.

Urizen typically appears with long and streaming white hair and beard, as in Blake’s plates throughout his First Book of Urizen from 1796.

But Urizen isn’t the only figure from Blake’s mythology who has long white hair and beard: above is Elohim Creating Adam from 1795, for example.

In Blake’s God Judging Adam also from about 1795, both figures sport long, flowing white hair and beards, which appear to be markers not so much of their ages or identities, but of the ancient nature of events.

Long white hair and beards are of course a long-established tradition in visual art: here is a contemporary example of Tiresias, the blind prophet of Apollo at Thebes, in Henry Fuseli’s Tiresias Appears to Ulysses During the Sacrifice (1780-85). Fuseli was Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, and a great influence on Blake.

Characteristic of the figure of Urizen in The Ancient of Days is the unusual way in which the figure’s hair and beard stream as if in a strong wind, the figure’s nakedness, and its posture.

This can be traced most immediately to a major work by another contemporary painter who was highly influential on Blake: James Barry’s King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia (1786–8). Barry was also Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy, and the similarities between King Lear’s white hair and beard here, and those of Blake’s Urizen in The Ancient of Days, are striking.

Blunt found another potential source in Pellegrino Tibaldi’s figure of Neptune (1549-51) in his fresco showing the story of Ulysses in the Palazzo Poggi. Although now relatively obscure, Blake saw fresco as being ‘true’ art, and was long an enthusiast of frescos, even if he saw few. A contemporary popular book of prints of frescos included an engraving of Tibaldi’s Neptune, so this image would have been accessible to both Blake and Barry.

It’s likely that Tibaldi’s Neptune was itself a reference to Michelangelo’s earlier frescos in the Sistine Chapel: the detail above showing God creating the sun and moon, and even more important that below showing the creation of Adam (c 1511).

Blake knew both of these sections of the Sistine Chapel frescos well, having engraved them previously. They also link to Blake’s own Elohim Creating Adam above.

Blake’s Urizen the architect, seen creating the world using his compasses, is distinct from both God and Elohim in his nakedness. In Blake’s written narrative, the distinction between Urizen and Elohim becomes more blurred, when the former goes on to have the role of the jealous and vengeful god of the Old Testament, until his desire for dominion brings about his downfall.

It may be tempting to assume that, just because Blake’s paintings appear so original and different, they originate entirely from his own mind. However, Blake was just as likely to borrow from and refer to other visual art as any other master.

References

Blunt, A (1959) The Art of William Blake, Oxford UP.
Butlin, M (1981) The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake, 2 vols, Yale UP. ISBN 978 0 300 02550 7.
Damon, S Foster (2013) A Blake Dictionary, the Ideas and Symbols of William Blake, updated edn., Dartmouth College Press. ISBN 978 1 61168 443 8.
Vaughan, William (1999) William Blake, British Artists, Tate Publishing. ISBN 978 1 84976 190 1.