The Mental Traveler: Allegory, Symbol, Diagram from Dante to Blake

5 credits · Graduate

The long history of figural representation beyond the mimetic - allegorical, symbolic, diagrammatic - involves the human effort to limn the perceptible world with the divine. The Romantic poet and artist William Blake used allegorical narratives and symbolic artwork, diagrammatic imagery and designs to express his own complex idea of eternity and what it meant to travel, quite literally, through it. This course will explore the theory and methodology of figural technique, particularly as it emerges in the early Christian Era and becomes historicized and appropriated in the eighteenth century and beyond. We will focus on the central works in Blake's extensive canon devoted to the symbolic pilgrimage of the human through a cosmos that is larger than time. From The Mental Travller through The Four Zoas, from Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims through Jerusalem, Blake's poetry, illuminated artowork, and designs will provide the basis for a deeper plunge into allegory, symbol, and diagram. We will consider the origins of religious mythologies and the relation of quantum cosmology and differential topology to the captivating universe of an artist who considered himself a Traveller thro' Eternity.