William Blake and his Illustrations to The Divine Comedy in Ideas of Good and Evil by William Butler Yeats.

“is not the Bacchus and Ariadne of Titian a talisman as powerfully charged with intellectual virtue as though it were a jewel-studded door of the city seen on Patmos?” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “now he wrote, ‘O glory, and O delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous fiend to his station’–he had overcome the merely reasoning and sensual portion of the mind–‘whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last twenty years of my life….”
  2. “Living in a time when technique and imagination are continually perfect and complete, because they no longer strive to bring fire from heaven, we forget how imperfect and incomplete they were in even the greatest masters”
  3. “This letter may have been the expression of a moment’s enthusiasm, but was more probably rooted in one of those intuitions of coming technical power which every creator feels, and learns to rely upon; for all his greatest work was done, and the principles of his art were formulated, after this date. Except a word here and there, his writings hitherto had not dealt with the principles of art except remotely and by implication; but now he wrote much upon them, and not in obscure symbolic verse, but in emphatic prose, and explicit if not very poetical rhyme.”
  4. “‘I know that the majority of Englishmen are bound by the indefinite … a line is a line in its minutest particulars, straight or crooked. It is itself not intermeasurable by anything else … but since the French Revolution’–since the reign of reason began, that is–‘Englishmen are all intermeasurable with one another, certainly a happy state of agreement in which I do not agree.'”
  5. “In the illustrations of Purgatory there is a serene beauty, and one finds his Dante and Virgil climbing among the rough rocks under a cloudy sun, and in their sleep upon the smooth steps towards the summit, a placid, marmoreal, tender, starry rapture.”