William Blake, The Whirlwind of Lovers (1826)
É sabido que William Blake, era reverente à Bíblia e tremendamente hostil para com a Igreja.
Dois contributos (só aparentemente) subsidiários:
1.
The commission for Dante's Divine Comedy came to Blake in 1826 through Linnell, with the ultimate aim of producing a series of engravings. Blake's death in 1827 would cut short the enterprise, and only a handful of the watercolours were completed, with only seven of the engravings arriving at proof form.
Even so, the Dante watercolours are among Blake's richest achievements, engaging fully with the problem of illustrating a poem of this complexity. The mastery of watercolour has reached an even higher level than before, and is used to extraordinary effect in differentiating the atmosphere of the three states of being in the poem.
Even as he seemed to near death, Blake's central preoccupation was his feverish work on the illustrations to Dante's Inferno; he is said to have spent one of the very last shillings he possessed on a pencil to continue sketching.
via Wikipedia
2.
But Blake's approximately 100 completed illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy show an extraordinary degree of visual imagination and careful craftsmanship. Blake had already read at least parts of Dante's poem by 1790, but he read it again, both in Italian and in the recent English translation by H.F. Cary, when he received Linnell's commission in 1825. The Whirlwind of Lovers (c.1826, 38x53cm) presents the scene in Canto V of the Inferno in which Dante meets the spirit of Francesca da Rimini, who committed adultery with her brother in law, Paolo. Overcome with grief at their story of thwarted love, Dante has fainted at the feet of his underworld guide, the Roman poet Virgil, as a whirlwind of other sinful lovers writhes around them. Rather than simply illustrate the story, Blake has reinterpreted it in both subtle and obvious ways. In all the illustrations Dante is clothed in red (symbol of the passions) and Virgil in blue (symbol of the imagination), corresponding to Blake's mythology that the imagination must guide our passions through the torment of the earth. More obviously, Blake put the spirits of Francesca and Paolo within the brilliant, heavenly light over Virgil's head, rather than in the whirlwind with the other condemned souls: though technically sinners, he allows them the salvation of their love. This watercolor was one of only seven from the Dante series that Blake also engraved; the story of Francesca da Rimini became one of the most popular episodes from Dante among 19th century artists and poets.
via Handprint
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