parad 3

British Museum
Blake Illuatrrations
St Peter, St James, Dante and Beatrice with St John Also


What might we do with these pictures? Knonski gave both of them to Paradiso XXV;


the first at lines 13-27, and the second picture at lines 100-108.


From wiki

"William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 at 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick St.) in Soho, London. He was the third of seven children,[14][15] two of whom died in infancy. Blake's father, James, was a hosier.[15] He attended school only long enough to learn reading and writing, leaving at the age of ten, and was otherwise educated at home by his mother Catherine Blake (née Wright).[16] Even though the Blakes were English Dissenters,[17] William was baptised on 11 December at St James's Church, Piccadilly, London.[18]


This from Counterlight:

"The poet and artist William Blake famously hated Saint Paul’s, considering it the very embodiment of that compromised institutional religion of law and rationality he always hated (never mind that his beloved Gothic was as much bound up with mathematics and measure, with the ambitions of king, bishop, and burgher, as Wren’s baroque edifice). Byron and the rest of the Romantics also hated Saint Paul’s. Byron dismissed it as just so much “commerce piled up to the sky.” The Victorians hated the building. Its baroque bulk offended Victorian religious sensibilities and English nationalism (every northern and central European nation in the 19th century claimed Gothic as their national and truly “Christian” style, only the French claim was legitimate). They added dark stained glass windows and archaizing Pre-Raphaelite mosaics to make the building into something other than what it was, to make it closer in feeling to Hagia Sophia’s mystical dark and further from Bramante’s classical light. Hitler’s Luftwaffe removed most of those Victorian accretions in World War II.