In Conversation with Rebecca Marks – Recording

00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:21.000 

I'm really excited to give this talk. I gave a kind of a short and truncated version of it to the Cambridge 18th century seminars last year, but because I have, 

00:00:21.001 --> 00:00:32.000 

as I was saying to Jason, a captive, Blake focused audience, I thought I would allow myself to slightly extend it to cover the scope of this paper. This paper will be published later this year in the Cambridge Quarterly 

00:00:32.001 --> 00:00:43.000 

so you know if if there's anything in it that you find interesting you'll be able to sort of reference later on, hopefully.

00:00:43.001 --> 00:00:52.000 

I suppose I'll just start there. So if you're if you could go on to the next slide please Annise, that would be great. 

00:00:52.001 --> 00:00:59.000 

Let me fix your attention on the single figures of the prophets, those "organs of embodied sentiment". 

00:00:59.001 --> 00:01:18.000 

This quotation comes from a lecture which was given by the artist and Professor, Henry Fuseli, a mentor of Blakes at London's Royal Academy of the Arts, in 1801. The lecture centres around the topic of invention in painting. By invention, Fuseli means how the artist reconciles the execution of their work through technique, composition, 

00:01:18.001 --> 00:01:26.000 

colour and so on, with their choice of subject. His example here is of Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel. 

00:01:26.001 --> 00:01:38.000 

In this vast composite fresco, Fuseli finds a perfect example of invention, where each element of the work, each character and panel synechdally reflects the theme of the wider whole. 

00:01:38.001 --> 00:01:50.000 

This theme, as you well know from the iconic centrepiece, the Creation of Adam, is the relationship between man and God, or in more meta, artistic terms, the relation of the creator to his creation. 

00:01:50.001 --> 00:02:05.000 

The specific characters within Michelangelo ceiling, which are the topic of this paper, are the prophets, sybils and ancestors of Christ. These figures make up the outer edges of the ceiling and the spandrels of the walls. Fuseli calls them organs of embodied sentiment. 

00:02:05.001 --> 00:02:19.000 

He finds them, because of their varied poses and gestures, to be archetypal embodiments of human emotive states, Isaiah is inspiration, Daniel is diligence, Zacharias consideration and so on. 

00:02:19.001 --> 00:02:28.000

The Delphi, Cumaean and other symbols are personifications of vigilance, meditation, instruction, divination, and so on. 

00:02:28.001 --> 00:02:43.000

Fuseli's reading of Michelangelo's prophets as emotive archetypes is indicative of a wider trend in painting in Blake's period, which proliferated in and around the Royal Academy, where artists were increasingly looking to the Sistine Chapel as a source of visual language. 

00:02:43.001 --> 00:02:52.000

In part because of Michelangelo's pioneering approach to painting and sculpture, and in part because of his canonisation in Georgia, Vasari's Lives of the Artists,

00:02:52.001 --> 00:03:04.000

Michelangelo's work had always been greatly revered. That much is certain. However, his distinctive style had fallen somewhat out of favour in the 17th and early 18th centuries owing to the creation of the French Academy

00:03:05.001 --> 00:03:15.000

And the change in aesthetic preferences which had occurred. At this time, the more balanced, harmonious neoclassical compositions of the Venetian and French painters were the more in vogue. 

00:03:15.001 --> 00:03:41.000

Michelangelo's style, on the other hand, was characteristically monumental. muscular, dynamic, and emotionally confronting. And because of this, when visual culture moved towards romanticism, with its focus on affect, power, drama, and the sublime at the turn of the 19th century, the Michelangelesque would again become popular in the fine arts, and especially in historical painting. 

00:03:41.001 --> 00:03:45.000

William Blake, however, had been well ahead of this curve. 

00:03:45.001 --> 00:04:03.000

From boyhood, he had frequented London's auction houses, gravitating towards the old master prints after Michelangelo, Raphael and Durer, which were then unfashionable, but with which he felt an obvious affinity. Across Blake's poetry and prose, the name Michelangelo is repeated more than 120 times. 

00:04:03.001 --> 00:04:14.000

Blake's first print, Joseph of Arimathea, made under the supervision of James Basire in the 1770s, was a copy of an engraving from Michelangelo's crucifixion of Saint Peter. 

00:04:14.001 --> 00:04:36.000

There are several works by Blake and many elements of his visual style which bear the influence of Michelangelo prints which he collected, and this is the subject of my PhD thesis. This paper focuses on this group of drawings by Blake from around the 1770s, after Michelangelo's prophets, sybils and patriarchs. I have termed this group of drawings his Sistine studies. 

00:04:14.001 --> 00:04:36.000

There has not been a dedicated critical study on these drawings since the late 70s, and a new one is long overdue, in no small part because considerable progress has been made since then in terms of how we now understand Blake as an artist and literary figure. 

00:04:36.001 --> 00:05:05.000

Contemporary Blake criticism, rather than further perpetuating the narrative of Blake as a lone artist operating on the margins of society has increasingly thought thoughts to contextualise him within the social and intellectual web of late 18th century London. 

00:05:05.001 --> 00:05:25.000

This is why I have chosen to reframe Blakes Sistine studies alongside Fuseli's lecture, because firstly, I'm interested in drawing links between Blake's interests and Michelangelo and the wider Michelangelo zeitgeist in painting which are spreading amongst his contemporaries like Fuse Lee, Barry, Flaxman, and so on. And secondly, because I wish to suggest  

00:05:25.001 --> 00:05:33.000

How and why these studies of Michelangelo's Sistine figures may have been an especially useful and productive exercise for Blake as an artist. 

00:05:33.001 --> 00:05:39.000

We know that Blake repurposed several of these early Michelangelo's figures in his later visual works. 

00:05:39.001 --> 00:05:54.000

We also know that Blake developed his own Michelangelo's figures, which repeat constantly throughout his illuminated books and paintings. My argument here is that Blake's Sistine studies and echoes of these drawings in his later works indicate his engagement with the dynamic and emergent

00:05:54.001 --> 00:06:04.000

visual culture, which at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries employed figures from Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel as a source of archetypal visual language. 

00:06:04.001 --> 00:06:10.000

And first, I'd like to cover the technical features of Blake's studies here, which you can see on this slide. 

00:06:10.001 --> 00:06:30.000

So they are a series of nine drawings after reproductive prints after Michelangelo's Sistine figures by the Italian engraver Adamo Scultori. Blake's studies here were likely completed relatively early on in his career, either in the 1770s when he was an apprentice engraver or in the mid 1780s when he. was working commercially. 

00:06:30.001 --> 00:06:35.000

The single coloured drawing may have been completed as late as 1795. 

00:06:35.001 --> 00:06:54.000

These studies are mostly done in graphite and grey ink and they are all about the size of an A5 piece of paper. A number of them are completed on the recto/verso of a single sheet of paper, so on both sides, confirming that these drawings were not intended as finished pieces, but rather as references or as drawing exercises. 

00:06:54.001 --> 00:06:56.000

Seven of the drawings are now in the British Museum. 

00:06:56.001 --> 00:07:22.000

They were acquired there, in 1867, from the collection of Frederick Tatham, one of Blake's disciples who had likely purchased the drawings from Blake's wife Catherine, in the 1820s. Two of the drawings, Cumea and a sketch of Ignudo, resurfaced in the art market in the early 2000s. The discovery of these lost pieces suggests to me, at least, that there are probably more studies extent. 

00:07:22.001 --> 00:07:45.000

And just on the Cumea and Ignudo, the authenticity of these works has been a source of debate. The general consensus is that the Cumea, owing to the style of the hands and the handwriting at the base of the image, is likely by Blake, however, because of its colouring critics have thought that it dates from slightly later during the period when Blake was experimenting with darker, water based pigments in the 1790s.

00:07:45.001 --> 00:08:10.000

The Ignudo on its Verso is more problematic because it does not bear much stylistic relation to the other cysteine studies. Not only is it more linear in style and in an earlier stage of finish, but it does not seem to derive from the same print collection as the other drawings. It doesn't look like the same Ignudo in the Adamo Scultori collection, where the other ones derived from. So my feeling is that it may have been drawn by someone else,

00:08:10.001 --> 00:08:19.000

maybe someone working alongside Blake in a workshop, though there is no way to confirm this. 

00:08:19.001 --> 00:08:38.000

OK, so Blake, studies are sourced from this particular group of 16th century prints. They were - so these prints were initially done in the 16th century by Adamo Scultori, but they were republished in a small folio in the 1770s by the Italian printer Carlo Lotzi, and they were extremely popular among artists

00:08:38.001 --> 00:08:55.000

in Blake's period in London, among his contemporaries. If you look on the right side of the slide, you can see that I found some similar sketches after Scultori's engravings by Blake's direct contemporaries John Linnell and James Barry. Both of them were known 

00:08:55.001 --> 00:09:17.000

to Blake. Moreover, famous painters like Sir Joshua Reynolds and Nathaniel Hone used Scultori's engravings as a source in their paintings in the 1780s and 90s. So suffice to say, Scultori's were by far the most popular of the reproductive engravings after the prophets and sibyls, which were circulating in 18th century London. 

00:09:17.001 --> 00:09:32.000

The reason why Blake composed these studies from reproductions and not from the Sistine Chapel directly was because he never saw Michelangelo's works in person. In fact, he never left the shores of the UK in his lifetime. His only claim to intimate knowledge of Michelangelo's work was a metaphysical one. 

00:09:32.001 --> 00:09:45.000

Blake apparently once told Thomas Phillips that he never saw any of the paintings of Michelangelo, but that he knew on good authority from his friend the Angel Gabriel that Michelangelo could paint an Angel better than Raphael. 

00:09:45.001 --> 00:10:05.000

Because of this, Blake Sistine studies raised a number of questions about the nature of mediated images. For example, how might Blake, who only saw Michelangelo's works via tiny printed fragments, have interpreted the visual language of Michelangelo's monumental imposing prophets and sibyls differently than someone like Fuseli, who had seen them in situ. 

00:10:05.001 --> 00:10:26.000

As you can see, Scultori's reproductions remove the architectural context of the Sistine Chapel and focus purely on isolated figures. These individual characters would have been easier to print and each of these plates could operate as motifs distributed across a public 16th century audience as souvenirs from the Vatican Chapel, which they might never get to see. 

00:10:26.001 --> 00:10:37.000

There are more than 70 figures within Scultori's whole collection of prints. We can only speculate as to why Blake may have selected these particular nine and why these nine would have been especially attractive. 

00:10:37.001 --> 00:11:00.000

In my view, I think it is likely that Blake would have gravitated towards figure types which related to his own creative interests. For example, familial groups - at this time he was drafting Songs of Innocence and Experience - or figures with props and motifs or figures in specifically evocative poses.

00:11:00.001 --> 00:11:08.000

So here on the left you can see Blake's Daniel and Cumea, which are the only examples of a prophet and a Sybil from among his Michelangelo drawings. 

00:11:08.001 --> 00:11:29.000

The prophets and the sibyls represent the largest of all the figures in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. Because of the schematic dominance of these figures, and perhaps also owing to their mythological significance, the prophets and symbols seem to be the most frequently studied and written about of the figure groups in Michelangelo's Chapel by 18th century art critics. Sir Thomas Lawrence, third president of the RA, 

00:11:29.001 --> 00:11:35.000

commissioned large scale painted reproductions of the prophets and sibyls for his personal study in the 1820s. 

00:11:35.001 --> 00:11:55.000

Another Academician, William Hilton, would visit the chapel and described Michelangelo's prophet Jeremiah as a grand and sublime thing which both enforces and inspires and emotional response in the onlooker. Hilton's own drawing of the Delphic sybil from the same year underlines this interest in Michelangelo's prophet as a source of inspiration. Another response, this time 

00:11:55.001 --> 00:12:03.000

by William Young Ottley, ascribes to Michelangelo's prophet Isaiah a sublime loftiness of character and deportment. 

00:12:03.001 --> 00:12:20.000

Just like Hilton, Ottley produces his own drawings after Michelangelo's Chapel. These he self publishes in a volume entitled The Italian School of Design, which is a kind of dedication to his Grand Tour of the 1790s and in which Michelangelo plays a significant role. 

00:12:20.001 --> 00:12:34.000

One of my answers to the question of how Michelangelo's figures from the Sistine Chapel might embody themselves in Blake's works is in the recurrence of this prophet with book motif across his visual oeuvre. we see this most frequently in Blakes Illuminations, 

00:12:34.001 --> 00:12:46.000

probably with the intention of drawing the reader's attention to the work as a readable and writable object. See for instance a figure who looks very like the Prophet Daniel in the background of plates 10 of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

00:12:46.001 --> 00:13:03.000

This link is persuasive not only because the pose is comparable to Blake's Sistine drawing, but also because of the playful conceptual irony of the Prophet being shown in collaboration with the devil, which would be a thematically appropriate motif for Blakes anarchic Marriage. 

00:13:03.001 --> 00:13:26.000

Another example comes in the frontispiece of Songs. Here in the mother figure, there are something of the Michelangelesque sybil, more than a direct allusion to Michelangelo's Cumea. However, I instead read this as an example of Blake using the sublime figure as a kind of archetype. Here the statuesque group of mother and child becomes a universal emblem of mothers and children. 

00:13:26.001 --> 00:13:55.000

The book wielding monumental Michelangelesque prophet figure appears in Blake in other places too. For example, in the frontispieces of Urizen and All Religions are One. I both of these illuminated books, Blake draws upon the visual tradition established by Michelangelo's prophets and uses it to elevate his characters to the status of monumental spiritual figures in these instances, and this is typical for Blake. He does so with subversive intentions. 

00:13:55.001 --> 00:14:15.000

Another example comes in Blake's illustrations to Edward Young's Night Thoughts. Here, Michelangelesque prophetic and sublime figures, seated, dressed in archaic garb, hunched over books and scrolls, reading, writing or simply contemplating serve as constant meta literary devices which mirror either the reader or the poet. 

00:14:15.001 --> 00:14:37.000

Through slight changes in pose and expression, Blake plays with the emotive language of their attitudes. Some are static, others are uncertain, others are studious, pedagogical, and so on, and these figures guide us through the poem, gesturing towards the text or urging us to turn the page. 

00:14:37.001 --> 00:14:57.000

Having briefly contextualised and tracked how the prophets and sibyls were read and echoed in Blake's works, I wish to turn now to a couple of the Patriarchs, Abias and Amminadab, and explain how these figures relate to Blake's interest in in the symbolic power of the human body, not just Abias and Amminadab. I realise I've actually expanded this talk from the last time I gave it, 

00:14:57.001 --> 00:15:09.000

Abias, Amminadab and the other figures too. So this is Abias the most well known of Blake's Sistine studies, and and he is one of the more minor patriarch figures from within Michelangelo schema, 

00:15:09.001 --> 00:15:34.000

And Abias the drawing is generally believed to be the source or one of the sources for Blakes Newton, one of the large colour prints of 1795. Critics have argued that Blake intentionally selected Michelangelo's Abias figure as the source for Newton because of its link to the Hebrew Patriarch Aviyam, second King of Judah, who can be seen to represent absolute submission to divine author. 

00:15:34.001 --> 00:15:59.000

I find this reading unconvincing as the prints which Blake was using were unlabeled, so there is no indication that Blake would have known that this figure represented Aviyam, and anyway, even if he did, Renaissance art historians know that Michelangelo's patriarchs don't correspond to their biblical names, but instead are sourced from figures and scenes of daily life which he would have seen in Renaissance Rome. 

00:15:59.001 --> 00:16:11.000

Rather, if we think about how Blake was first taught to read prints at a traditional drawing school and then as an apprentice engraver, I think it is much more likely that he probably read Scultori's Sistine figures in a technical way,

00:16:11.001 --> 00:16:24.000

that Abias, a figure with its prostrate, introspective, pendulous pose, would not have been attractive to Blake simply because it was a biblical figure, but rather because of the fact that it was by Michelangelo, and because of its expressive power. 

00:16:24.001 --> 00:16:55.000

While the Abias pose is powerfully echoed in the composition of Blake Newton, he does make some alterations, such as revealing the face and redirecting the gaze towards the pair of compasses with which he draws his infernal diagrams. These subtle changes have the effect of lifting the figure from a pose of submission to one of authority. However, the irony here lies in how this authority is directed downwards towards the empirical world as opposed to upwards towards the heavenly poetic one. 

00:16:55.001 --> 00:17:16.000

It has long been established in Blake criticism that Blake was highly interested in the linguistic potential of the human body. The landmark study in this was Janet Warner's Blake and the Language of Art in 1984. A visualisation of how bodily language operates in Blake comes in a two-sided drawing from his notebook, known as various personifications. This is now held in the Harvard libraries. 

00:17:16.001 --> 00:17:26.000

This diagram offers a visual key of how recurrent figures in Blake's prints and paintings correspond to sentiments such as pity, misery, weariness and so on. 

00:17:26.001 --> 00:17:44.000

Several of these figures evoke the forms and poses of Blake's earlier Sistine Studies, in particular the pity figure shares the downward facing outstretched arms of Blakes abbia, their emblematic and archetypal forms evoked the dramatic pathos formulae of Renaissance painting. 

00:17:44.001 --> 00:17:58.000

These sketches indicate that Blake's early copying exercises certainly informed how he would later conceptualise the human figure in his visual work, like Michelangelo. Perhaps even more so, Blake used the human body as a cypher. 

00:17:44.001 --> 00:18:12.000

If the Sistine prophets are organs of embodied sentiment, so too are Blakes figures leaping, crouching and praying all across the margins of his illuminated books. 

00:18:12.001 --> 00:18:19.000

So far I have covered the Daniel, Cumea and Abias so where and how then does Blake use his other Sistine studies? 

00:18:19.001 --> 00:18:45.000

Well, the Cumea, Mattan and Abiud drawings are all examples of maternal filial groups. As I have mentioned, Blake Songs, though officially published in 1789, was drafted in 1783 to 84 concurrent with the proposed dates of these 16 drawings. Because of this, it is possible that at this time Blake may have been searching for pastoral or familial imagery from his personal collection of old master prints and happened upon them. 

00:18:45.001 --> 00:19:05.000

The Mattan for example may have been useful to Blake as an emblem of the nuclear familial group with mother, father and child. The Abide, though also familial, has a very different emotional tombre to that of the Mattan and seems to suggest an emblem of motherly love or protection. Both the Mattan and the Abiud figure groups were also drafted by Blake's contemporaries in the 1790s. 

00:19:05.001 --> 00:19:11.000

Ottley, for example, included a version of the Mattan Nanette in his aforementioned print collection, the Italian. 

00:19:11.001 --> 00:19:32.000

Similarly, the Abide group appears in Conrad Metz's imitations. Where Metz has interpreted the mother's expression as a benignly one, Blake's instead gives an overall atmosphere of fear. The comparison starkly highlights the ways in which copying itself is a kind of invention, especially when the copy has passed through multiple hands. 

00:19:32.001 --> 00:19:52.000

Blake's Mattan study has been linked to a number of his later illustrations, including several figures in Songs, Night thoughts and Marriage, as well as the frontispiece to Benjamin Heath Malkin's A Father's Memories of his Child. None of these links are certain though they all capture the general attitude of a mother figure reaching out towards a child as an expression of maternal love. 

000:19:52.001 --> 00:20:08.000

One heretofore unidentified instance of a visual echo of the Mattan figure comes on plate 30 of Jerusalem. This page illustrates Blake's Los gesturing towards two child figures which represent the two diverging components of his soul, Enitharmon and Urthona. 

000:20:08.001 --> 00:20:35.000

In attitude, this group echoes that of the filial Mattan for although Los is ostensibly masculine in this illustration, Blake has converted him into a maternal feminine allegory in terms of the abelian group Jenijoy La Belle and Michael J Tolley have related that the wailing Mother on the frontispiece of America, a prophecy is very like a Michelangeloesque Abiud or a Sybil? 

000:20:35.001 --> 00:21:02.000

Turning to the last two studies in Blake's Sistine Series, we come to the single figures of Solomon and manasses. With regard to Solomon, in my view, Blake may have been interested in the symbolic resonances of the archaic spinning loom. Comparable drawings of lunette figures from the Sistine Chapel by Fuseli - for example, his sketch of the writing figure from the Josephat lunette - indicate that Michelangelo's characters were, in certain instances of interest because of their props, books, canes, moons and so on.

000:21:02.001 --> 00:21:14.000

We know that Blake, who routinely harnessed the symbolism of objects such as the anvil and the power of compasses in the illuminated books was highly attuned to the metaphorical power of object motif. 

000:21:14.001 --> 00:21:22.000

The loom in particular comes up in his night thoughts illustrations and in Jerusalem, where it has always operated either by a single figure or by a group of three. 

000:21:22.001 --> 00:21:56.000

In Jerusalem, the loom takes on creative and destructive capabilities. It is fiery, shining, whirling, and terrible. The emblem of the wheel like loom ties into the widest version of the allegory of Ezekiel's Wheels which underlies Blake's Jerusalem. Moreover, the loom motif might even be read as a symbolic representation of the narrative structure of the poem as a whole, fundamentally cyclical in its scope, imbued with the terrible labour of the artist, beginning with an ending, and vice versa. 

000:21:56.001 --> 00:22:19.000

Blake's interest in the Manasses figure is likely related to the visual connotations of the figure's thoughtful, Rodin-like pose. The most striking link between the Manasses sketch and Blake's latter work comes again in Jerusalem. This time, plate 78 in an illustration of a naked bird headed man shown seated on a rocky outcrop overlooking the sea with a sunset in the background. 

000:22:19.001 --> 00:22:34.000

The pose of the Birdman echoes that of the Manasses drawing, though this time the figure has a different configuration of its limbs and obviously its head. Blake's Birdman has been linked to Durer's Melancholia as well as to the traditional symbol of St. John the Baptist. 

000:22:34.001 --> 00:22:56.000

While both the origin and the symbolic significance of Blake's Birdman is unclear, the pose has been identified as highly expressive of a mood of conflicting emotions. Moreover, if we track the Jerusalem bird figure onto Blake's various personifications, it closely aligns with an emblem which Blake captions listlessness, which also evokes the Manasses in shape and attitude. 

000:22:56.001 --> 00:23:37.000

These links serve to highlight the significance of the figure or types like it as part of Blake's visual library, underlining the importance of statuesque, Michelangeloesque poses as a narrative tool in his illuminated books and elsewhere. Finally, I wish to draw your attention to Blake's study of Michelangelo's Aminadab, which is the only study in Blakes series to which he adds an original caption the Reposing Traveller. What has been read, is most significant about Blake's caption. Here is the way in which it transmutes Michelangelo's Aminadab into the context of Blake's own idea, interpreting the figure as an avatar for his poetic creativity.

000:23:37.001 --> 00:23:52.000

Gene Hagstrom, for example, described describes Blakes Aminadab as a figure by Michelangelo which has been transformed into Blake's poet, the mental traveller who strides across the landscape sometimes as a boy, sometimes as a young man or sits under the tree and writes in a book.

000:23:52.001 --> 00:24:20.000

This motif of the reposing traveller is certainly recurrent throughout Blakes poetry. It appears, for example, in a couplet which accompanies Blake's illustrations to Robert Gray's poems around the springs of Grey, my wild root weaves traveller repose and dream among my leaves, as well as in his unpublished poem the mental traveller, in which Blake uses the image of the traveller as an allegory for the plight of man who wanders through the ambiguous landscape of life. 

000:24:20.001 --> 00:24:37.000

It is indeed Blake's reposing traveller, and not Michelangelo's Patriarch Aminadab, who emerges in this drawing because Blake, with his caption, has metamorphosed the biblical patriarch into the traveller poet.

000:24:37.001 --> 00:25:07.000

I realised that I haven't actually include explained what the Night Thoughts image is here, but this is this comes in the section of my thoughts about man and his discontent and this figure likely is sourced from the Aminadab and he represents a king sort of lording over his tiny City made of straws, which is what the figure is pointing to. So that's just another case of Blake sourcing these earlier studies into later drawings in his illustrations. 

000:25:07.001 --> 00:25:26.000

While my referring to Blake's studies as a series throughout this chapter may have projected a sense of their being kept together, I believe that the reality is much more fragmented. For example, I would like to suggest a possible instance of Blake using an entirely new character from Scultori's set, although no direct study by Blake after this figure has yet been discovered. 

000:25:26.001 --> 00:26:03.000

This figure comes in Blake's Night Thoughts illustrations. It is more than likely that, as with the other drawings in his existing series, Blake's interest in this character has much to do with the dramatic and emotive effect of its pose. Slumped, contorted, and expressing a sense of confinement and despair, this is precisely how Blake uses the figure in his illustration as an emblem of imprisonment and existential dread. While Blake's version of the figure is horizontally inverted, the visual link remains evident for the leaning angle of the body is the same, and so is the height and shape of the plinth upon which the figure is lying. 

000:26:03.001 --> 00:26:10.000

Blake's alterations only emphasised the theatrical attitude of the original, which indicates a specific interest in the drama of its gesture. 

000:26:10.001 --> 00:26:39.000

Assuming with good reason that this night thoughts figure derives from the Scultori collection, we can take two youthful points from this example. Firstly, that Blake may have drawn upon Michelangelo Sistine figures as a visual source, even in cases where he may not have made an intermediary sketch, and secondly, that he may have been doing well. So into the 1790s, much later than the proposed date of the other Sistine Studies between 1770 and 1785. 

000:26:39.001 --> 00:27:04.000

David Bindman argues that the Sistine studies are generally of little interest because of their status as mundane copies. However, I do not necessarily agree with this. Instead, I think that their status as copies is precisely what makes them interesting, because in these drawings we can see Blake's early and obvious interest in the emblematic power of the human figure. Through these drawings, it is clear that Blake's a young artist used reproductions of Michelangelo's works as part of his own artistic 

000:27:04.001 --> 00:27:19.000

development and crucially, he did not do this independently from others around him, but rather was one of a number of artists who were each studying Michelangelo's works and looking to harness, in Fuseli's words, his sublime, epic, allegoric, lyrics substance for their very own.