The Visionary Art of William Blake: Christianity, Romanticism and the Pictorial Imagination

Description

William Blake (1757-1827) is considered one of the most singular and brilliant talents that England has ever produced. Celebrated now for the originality of his thinking, painting and verse, he shocked contemporaries by rejecting all forms of organized worship even while adhering to the truth of the Bible. But how did he come to equate Christianity with art? How did he use images and paint to express those radical and prophetic ideas about religion which he came in time to believe? And why did he conceive of Christ himself as an artist: in fact, as the artist, par excellence? These are among the questions which Naomi Billingsley explores in her subtle and wide-ranging new study in art, religion and the history of ideas. Suggesting that Blake expresses through his representations of Jesus a truly distinctive theology of art, and offering detailed readings of Blake's paintings and biblical commentary, she argues that her subject thought of Christ as an artist-archetype. Blake's is thus a distinctively 'Romantic' vision of art in which both the artist and his saviour fundamentally change the way that the world is perceived. In drawing upon contemporaneous religious writings and artistic representations of similar subjects, this book presents an historically grounded account of Blake's oeuvre. It offers new interpretations of his individual works while also identifying textual and pictorial sources that previously have been overlooked. It will have strong interdisciplinary appeal: to intellectual historians; scholars and students of religion and literature; art historians; and all those interested in the vivid figural articulation of a uniquely English theological radicalism.

Naomi Bilingsley is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute in the University of Manchester, UK. The holder of a PhD in Theology from the same university, she was previously Bishop Otter Scholar for Theology and the Arts in the Diocese of Chichester and remains a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Arts and the Sacred at King's College London. She contributed to the volume Visualising a Sacred City: London, Art and Religion (edited by Ben Quash, Aaron Rosen and Chloe Reddaway), published by I.B.Tauris in 2017.

A timely exploration of Blake's 'theology of art' ... Throughout, Billingsley is at her most interesting when she takes an image and explores it in depth ... A very welcome contribution to our understanding of Blake and specifically his visualisations of Christ, his theology of art and his viewer-response aesthetic. * Art and Christianity * This welcome and necessary book seeks to expound how Blake expressed his theology of art in his depictions of Christ. It captures so much of what is essential and distinctive about Blake's artistic endeavour. By pointing to "Blake's intensely audience-centred approach to art" - in which it is the perception of the viewer, as well as the possibility of their apocalyptic transformation, that matters - Naomi Billingsley offers us a compelling explanation of the intention of Blake's images. * Christopher Rowland, Dean Ireland's Professor Emeritus of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture, University of Oxford, UK, and author of Blake and the Bible * This pioneering study is not just a tightly controlled, jargon-free and well-illustrated exercise in visual Christology. It also makes a compelling case for our own purportedly "post-Christian" century to re-engage with Blake's art less as the work of a gifted, if maverick, pantheist and more as that of someone for whom, as Naomi Billingsley persuasively argues, "Christianity is art and Jesus Christ was an artist, who is both the model and the source of artistic activity". * Graham Howes , Emeritus Fellow of Trinity Hall , Cambridge, UK, and author of The Art of the Sacred : An Introduction to the Aesthetics o Art and Belief *