Blake, Lavater, and Physiognomy

William Blake never travelled to the continent, yet his creation myth is far more European that has ever been acknowledged. The painter Henry Fuseli introduced Blake to traditional European thinking, and Blake responded to late 18th century body-theory in his Urizen books (1794-95), which emerged from his professional work as a copy-engraver on Henry Hunter's translation of Johann Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy (1789-98). Lavater's work contains hundreds of portraits and their physiognomical readings. Blake, Fuseli, Joshua Reynods and their contemporaries took a keen interest in the ideas behind physiognomy in their search for the right balance between good likeness and type in portraits.

Blake, Lavater and Physiognomy examines the early reception of Lavater's work and demonstrates how the challenges occurring during the production of Hunter's translation resonate in Blake's treatment of the Genesis story. Blake takes us back to the creation of the human body. and interrogates the idea that `God created man after his own likeness.' As Erle shows, Blake's startlingly original take on the creation myth is informed by Lavater's physiognomical project: the search for divine likeness, traced in the faces of his chosen subjects.

Sibylle Erle is Senior Lecturer in English at Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln.
Legenda is a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing. The series Studies in Comparative Literature ranges widely across comparative and theoretical topics in literary and translation studies, accommodating research at the interface between different artistic media and between the humanities and the sciences.