Customer Reviews

Divine Comedy of William Blake

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This exquisite volume contains the 102 watercolors that Blake had been commissioned to produce to illustrate Dante's "Divine Comedy". He worked on these watercolors for the last three years of his life and died with the project incomplete. Even though these illustrations are in varying degrees of completion, for people like me who love William Blake, each is a vast treasure and a joy to study.

This is fine edition that has an introductory essay by the editor, David Bindman. This essay and all of the captions are given in English, German, and French side-by-side and on the opposite page to the reproduced watercolor. The colors are rich and beautiful and the reproductions are clear and precise.

Mr. Bindman is to be applauded for the gorgeous book. It was given to me as a gift by a very thoughtful friend to whom I am very grateful.

There is still much work to be done in picking up the clues to Blake's meaning and analyzing Blake's choices of subject from The Divine Comedy, even though he certainly would have altered and finished the many watercolors that are still penciled in. In doing so he would have probably covered up some of his spontaneous responses to Dante, and replaced the often breathtaking freedom of pencil-work with a more measured application of pen and watercolor. There would have been gains in in overall coherence and the resolution of some problems of interpretation, but there would have also been a loss of the most precious things about the series as it was left to us; the wonderful sense of Blake's mind working upon the problem of Dante, with an immediacy of perception lost in the more finished watercolors. When we see them altogether as an unfinished series still with spontaneous and even scatological comments left on the underdrawings, as we do in this volume, it is as if we were looking at them in Blake's own workroom and holding a conversation with him at the same time.