‘Naked Beauty Display’d’. Bodies, souls and sexuality in William Blake’s composite art. Part I

William Blake’s philosophic and aesthetic system is a syncretic and original re-elaboration of classical, Neoplatonic, Gnostic, Christian and Hermetic thought. Inspired by the myth of the earthly paradise, by John Milton and by the American and French Revolutions as well, Blake creates a complex and symbolic body language that reveals the consubstantiality of opposites such as spirit and matter, the divine and the human, macrocosm ad microcosm. His bodies, mainly represented in the two opposed postures of expansion and contraction, are endowed with a writhing movement, a serpentine pattern and androgynous features that evoke Michelangelo’s art: considering that Blake’s main goal is the alchemic coincidentia oppositorum, androgyny is a recurring theme in his works