Pity

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the USA.

Relief engraving, feather, ink, watercolour, paper.

To create the work, William Blake used a unique technique of “luminous printing”, thanks to which light figures on a dark gray-green background look mystical and mysterious. Unlike other works of the artist, which are illustrations for literary works, the plot of this picture does not have a specific source. Many consider it an illustration of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, although there is no good reason for this. Perhaps Blake depicted the heroes of the pantheon of gods he created or simply gave vent to his imagination. It is one of the most fantastic of the artist’s works; it had a great influence on the development of Symbolism and Surrealism in the visual arts.