Abstract
Throughout this book, an attempt has been made to analyse Blake’s ‘visions’ as visual and auditory neurophysiological conditions whose phenomenology is capable of recovery and explanation. The aim throughout has been no more complicated than to restore the ‘visions’ to an artist who declared himself to be a ‘visionary.’ Blake’s hallucinatory conditions, all of which can be broadly accommodated within Dominic H. ffytche’s hodological model of brain interconnectedness, have measurable prevalence within the general population. Blake’s conditions occur only in a small minority of the population, but they are not rare and do not evidence dysfunction. Although this study has not had a particularly polemical agenda, its thesis should do something to displace continuing assertions alleging degrees of psychosis. The allegation of madness has never quite left Blake. The legacy of Robert Hunt’s aspersion, made in the only known review of the 1809 exhibition, referring to ‘WILLIAM BLAKE, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement,’ has endured. Writing the ‘Afterword’ for the 2019 Tate Britain William Blake exhibition catalogue, the writer and self-described magician, Alan Moore, alluded to the artist as ‘the Lambeth angel-whisperer,’ a clever nod-and-a-wink whose levity does not quite conceal its generic ancestry in Hunt’s review.
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Notes
- 1.
Dominic H. ffytche, ‘The hodology of hallucinations,’ Cortex 44 (2008) pp. 1067–1083.
- 2.
BR(2): p 283.
- 3.
Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon, with afterword by Alan Moore (eds.), William Blake (London: Tate Publishing, 2019) p 201.
- 4.
Badcock Johanna C., Dehon Hedwige, Larøi Frank, ‘Hallucinations in Healthy Older Adults: An Overview of the Literature and Perspectives for Future Research,’ Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017): https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01134. Accessed 3 May 2023.
- 5.
Carmichael, D.A., Smees, R., Shillcock, R.C. and Simner, J. (2019), ‘Is there a burden attached to synaesthesia? Health screening of synaesthetes in the general population.’ Br J Psychol, 110: 530–548.
- 6.
S. Baron-Cohen, D. Johnson, J. Asher, S. Wheelwright, S.E. Fisher, P.K. Gregersen, et al. ‘Is synaesthesia more common in autism?’ Molecular Autism, 4 (1) (2013) Item 40.
- 7.
Jamie Ward, Paris Brown, Jasmine Sherwood, Julia Simner, ‘An autistic-like profile of attention and perception in synaesthesia,’ Cortex, 107 (2018) pp 121–130.
- 8.
BR(2): p 412.
- 9.
BR(2): pp 420–421. Underlining in Bentley.
- 10.
BR(2): p 10.
- 11.
G. Munro Smith, ‘Literary Notes,’ British Medical Journal 2 (11 September 1909) p 710.
- 12.
Butlin: 127.
- 13.
June E. Downey, ‘Literary Synaesthesia,’ The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 9 (1912) pp 490–498.
- 14.
Adam Zeman, Matthew MacKisack, John Onians, ‘The Eye’s mind—Visual imagination, neuroscience and the humanities,’ Cortex, 105 (2018) pp 1–3.
- 15.
Joel Pearson, Colin W.G. Clifford, Frank Tong, ‘The Functional Impact of Mental Imagery on Conscious Perception,’ Current Biology, 18 (2008) pp 982–986.
- 16.
BR(2): p 273. Although Cromek commissioned designs from Blake, the engraving contract was awarded to the more fashionable engraver, Luigi Schiavonetti.
- 17.
BR(2): p 491.
- 18.
The Butts temperas of Biblical subjects are Butlin: 379–432. The Butts watercolours of Biblical subjects are Butlin: 433–526.
- 19.
Naomi Billingsley, The Visionary Art of William Blake: Christianity, Romanticism and the Pictorial Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2018) pp 92–131.
- 20.
Butlin: 452, 494, 496, 497, 498, 499, 500, 504, 507, 484.
- 21.
David Bindman, Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977) p 128.
- 22.
Butlin: 439, 446, 485, 488, 489, 517.
- 23.
Anthony Blunt, The Art of William Blake (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) p 73.
- 24.
David Bindman, Blake as an Artist (Oxford: Phaidon, 1977) p 128.
- 25.
The most scholarly edition is David Bindman (ed.) William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (London: The William Blake Trust, 1987).
- 26.
David Blayney Brown and Martin Myrone, ‘William Blake’s 1809 Exhibition,’ Tate Papers, no.14, Autumn 2010, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/william-blake-1809-exhibition, Accessed 18 February 2016; Susan Matthews, ‘An Alternative National Gallery: Blake’s 1809 Exhibition and the Attack on Evangelical Culture,’ Tate Papers, no.14, Autumn 2010, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/an-alternative-national-gallery-blakes-1809-exhibition-and-the-attack-on-evangelical-culture, Accessed 18 February 2016; Philippa Simpson, ‘Lost in the Crowd: Blake and London in 1809,’ Tate Papers, no.14, Autumn 2010, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/lost-in-the-crowd-blake-and%20london-in-1809, Accessed 18 February 2016; Konstantinos Stefanis, ‘Reasoned Exhibitions: Blake in 1809 and Reynolds in 1813,’ Tate Papers, no.14, Autumn 2010, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/reasoned-exhibitions-blake-in-1809-and-reynolds-in-1813, Accessed 18 February 2016.
- 27.
Aileen Ward, ‘“sr Joshua and His Gang”: William Blake and the Royal Academy,’ Huntington Library Quarterly 52 (1989) pp. 75–95.
- 28.
BR(2): 250–51; Butlin: 438, 500, 642.
- 29.
The best guide is Butlin: 639–48, supplemented by Albert S. Roe, ‘A Drawing of the Last Judgment,’ Huntington Library Quarterly, 21 (1957) pp 57–67. For Blake’s borrowings from Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, see Chayes, Irene H. (1984) “‘Blake’s Ways with Art Sources: Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment,’” Colby Quarterly: Vol. 20 pp 60–89. The precise title, A Vision of the Last Judgment (as opposed to The Last Judgment), seems to have no contemporary authority (not even Blake’s).
- 30.
It was inscribed by Blake, ‘W Blake inv & del: 1808,’ Butlin: 642.
- 31.
W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Blake’s Visions of the Last Judgment: Some Problems in Interpretation,’ Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly 9 (1975) pp 7–10.
- 32.
Butlin: 645, 648.
- 33.
David V. Erdman, with Donald K. Moore, The Notebook of William Blake: A Photographic and Typographic Facsimile (New York: Readex Books, 1973, revised edn, 1977).
- 34.
On the symmetry of spirals, see I. Hargittai and C.A. Pickover (eds.), Spiral Symmetry (Singapore: World Scientific, 1992).
- 35.
Jack D. Cowan, ‘Geometric visual hallucinations and the structure of the visual cortex,’ Daniel Collerton, Urs Peter Mosimann, Elaine Perry (eds.) The Neuroscience of Visual Hallucinations (2014) chapter 10, pp. 217–253, cited on p. 228. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118892794.
- 36.
Butlin: 643, 644, 648. He also seems to have acquired two tracings of the same subject, Butlin: 646 and 647.
- 37.
Butlin: 643. Tatham sold this and two other versions of the Last Judgement, Nos. 644 and 646 or 647, at Sotheby’s, 29 April 1862. The ‘2 others[sic] sketches’ must be two of the four Visionary Heads Tatham is known to have owned, Butlin: 756, 758, 759, 764.
- 38.
R. van der Zwan, E. Leo, W. Joung, C. Latimer, P. Wenderoth, ‘Evidence that both area V1 and extrastriate visual cortex contribute to symmetry perception,’ Current Biology 8 (1998), pp. 889–892.
- 39.
Herman Weyl, Symmetry (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1953); Christopher W. Tyler, ‘Some Principles of Spatial Organization in Art,’ Spatial Vision 20 (2007) pp 509–530.
- 40.
Steven Goldsmith, Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation (Ithaca and London, 1993) pp 148–152; Christopher Rowland, Blake and the Bible (New Haven, CT: 2010) pp 229–230; Susanne Sklar, ‘Erotic Spirituality in Blake’s Last Judgment,’ Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly (eds.) Sexy Blake (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) pp 125–140; Naomi Billingsley, The Visionary Art of William Blake: Christianity, Romanticism and the Pictorial Imagination (London: T&T Clark, 2018) p 153.
- 41.
S. Zeki and M. Lamb, ‘The neurology of kinetic art,’ Brain 117 (1994) pp. 607–636.
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Worrall, D. (2024). Discussion and Conclusion. In: William Blake's Visions. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53254-2_9
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