‘To Recover Art to the Florentine Original’: William Blake’s Reception of Michelangelo

This thesis is an examination of William Blake’s reception of Michelangelo, focusing primarily on visual works and art criticism. I argue, firstly, that by understanding Michelangelo’s reception in London across Blake’s lifetime we can better contextualise the rise in interest in Italian culture which occurred in Britain in the latter-eighteenth century. Secondly, I contend that Blake’s lifelong interest in Michelangelo offers a novel way of contextualising Blake within the fine arts culture of his period. Using Michelangelo as a nexus, I thus categorise Blake as one of a group of English school artists (including Fuseli, Barry, and Flaxman) who were all looking to Michelangelo as a model for Romantic artistic ideals (such as affect, genius, and the sublime). This thesis fills a gap in Blake scholarship. There has been no examination of Blake’s ideological commitment to the Italian Renaissance, nor has there been any sustained visual analyses of his artistic inheritances from Michelangelo (E 698). Moreover, because Blake never visited Italy, his understanding of Michelangelo would have been almost entirely amassed from mediated materials. Thus, another contribution here is a collation of materials relating to Michelangelo which would have been available in London in the eighteenth century. The first two chapters examine the literary and print cultures through which Blake encountered Michelangelo’s works. Chapter one looks at early modern and eighteenth-century Anglophone art criticism, arguing for a shift in Michelangelo’s reputation, away from moderate Neoclassical ideals and towards a Romantic celebration of genius and emotional intensity. Chapter two explores the role of reproductive engravings in shaping Blake’s understanding of the Renaissance, and shows how the graphic linearity of sixteenth-century prints would have profoundly influenced Blake’s style and philosophy of art. Chapters three, four, and five are case studies. Chapter three addresses a series of drawings by Blake after reproductions of the Sistine Chapel which I term his ‘Sistine Studies’ (c. 1770–90). I contend that these works represent Blake’s amassing of visual library of affective archetypes from Michelangelo. I show how Blake returns to these poses and gestures on numerous occasions in his later work, and situate these Studies alongside comparable drawings by Blake’s contemporaries. Chapter four addresses the impact of the historic association of Michelangelo with the Hellenistic statue, the Belvedere Torso, on Blake. I collate four quotations of the Torso in his works (Blake’s ‘Blasphemer Series’, c. 1800–20) and argue the physical characteristics of the Torso (the fragmented body and the serpentine line) visibly inform Blake’s development of a Michelangelesque figural style. The final chapter reframes Blake’s lost Last Judgement, and its earlier designs (c. 1805–27), as history painting. I interpret Blake’s Last Judgement as a public-facing, didactic, narrative work in the tradition of the Renaissance painters, made with the ideological purpose of making ‘England like Italy’ (E 768).

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Marks, Rebecca

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Haggarty, Sarah

• Eighteenth century studies
• History of Art
• Michelangelo
• Neoclassicism
• Reception
• Romanticism
• William Blake

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/bb3f5063-176f-44f9-9ebf-6bc21cb77055/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0000-0003-2313-2092

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/383966