ABSTRACT
In the 1790s the two main factors of the European context of the early illuminated books are William Blake's friendship with Henry Fuseli and the engraver team working on Henry Hunter's translation of Johann Caspar Lavater's physiognomy, Essays on Physiognomy. Lavater's physiognomy, with its analyses and interpretations of facial features, first appeared in German in the 1770s. Drawing on the historical connections between Blake and Lavater, this comparative study historicizes text–image relationships in Urizen by foregrounding the characters' struggles with the embodiment of their identity and, more generally, how Blake's creation myth comments on the production of good copies. Blake's fascination with physiognomical theory has to do with the complex text–image relationships which he discovered, through Fuseli, in the work of Lavater. These relationships undermine the consistency of the plot of Urizen and challenge the parameters of the identity of the figures, created and creating.
