Hotspur🏳️🌈🇺🇦<p>"The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun," William Blake, c. 1805.</p><p>Blake (1757-1827) was one of the great visionary artists of all time. Both his paintings and poetry were hugely influential on the Romantic movement. He was a friend of Thomas Paine, although he had his disagreements with both the American and French revolutions, and was also involved in mysticism. He had his own idiosyncratic beliefs, and even today biographers have a hard time classifying his spirituality; it was definitely Christian but also rejected the Church of England and any other recognized denomination.</p><p>This is one of a series of illustrations he did as part of a commission to illustrate the Bible. Here, he depicts Revelations 12, which mentions a "great red dragon."</p><p>Blake is a fascinating and diverse character I need to learn much more about. He had a fervent religiosity about him, but was also a believer in free love and rejected many of Christianity's ideas of virtue and chastity. His poetry involved various revisions of the traditional creation story. He was also a huge influence on the Beat Generation and some feel his idea prefigure Karl Jung's ideas of the psyche. In other words, there's a lot going on there.</p><p>From the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.</p><p><a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/tags/Art" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Art</span></a> <a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/tags/VisionaryArt" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>VisionaryArt</span></a> <a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/tags/Romanticism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>Romanticism</span></a> <a href="https://social.vivaldi.net/tags/WilliamBlake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>WilliamBlake</span></a></p>