The Body of the Blasphemer

Abstract

Blake’s output as a visual artist has figured relatively little in the efforts of scholars to recover or detect homoerotic, homosexual and anti-homophobic themes, motifs or values at play in his art. As art historians working on Blake have repeatedly emphasized, his work as a visual artist in watercolour and tempera can appear the least exceptional aspect of his creative output: it is, simply put, in his drawings and paintings that he most looks like his contemporaries, and is most clearly dependent on specific visual precedents (pre-eminently the work of Henry Fuseli).¹ His work in these media has been of diminishing interest to a tradition of scholarship largely taken up with the effort to demonstrate Blake’s exceptionalism.