Word as Image in William Blake

Abstract

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” These opening words of the Gospel according to St. John encapsulate the problem of the representation of God and the relationship of word and image that permeates the whole of Jewish, Christian and Islamic culture. Blake, as a man with a strong religious sense who expressed himself in both words and visual images, played a peripheral and partial, but significant, role in this tradition, with the late Laoco⃶n print coming as the culmination of his own very personal solution of the problem.¹