‘The Sculptor Silent Stands before His Forming Image’: Blake and Contemporary Sculpture

Abstract

In his series of lectures delivered to the Royal Academy between 1810 and 1826, John Flaxman sought to raise the status of his profession, and of the cultural and aesthetic importance of sculpture, in the eyes of his fellow acade micians. Part of Flaxman’s strategy was to remind the Academy of the ideological battles fought by the painters and sculptors of the Italian Renaissance to secure their respective arts’ intellectual parity with poetry. Flaxman’s attempt to recuperate sculpture as a commensurate art at the beginning of the nineteenth century was not simply an exercise in self-promotion. Flaxman enjoyed a very successful career even before being elected to the Royal Academy in 1800. After the death of Thomas Banks in 1805, Flaxman was, as Blake puts it in a letter to William Hayley, ‘without a competitor in Sculpture’ (E764), and in 1810 the position of Professor of Sculpture was created by the Royal Academy specifically for Flaxman (see Flaxman xxv and fn.) Rather, Flaxman’s arguments for reassessing the historical, theoretical, and aesthetic value of sculpture were necessary because during the previous two centuries, the tripartite paragone, that is the comparison between the sister arts of poetry, painting, and sculpture, had effectively been reduced to the binary of ut pictura poesis.¹