Piedade

Blake made this around 1795, one of a group of large color prints he produced by a method of his own, pressing paint from a board onto paper and finishing each sheet by hand. Only three impressions of it survive. Its subject is stranger than most. Blake took a simile from Shakespeare's Macbeth, in which the guilty king imagines pity as a naked newborn babe striding the blast, borne on the winds of heaven. Rather than illustrate the murder behind those lines, he painted the comparison itself. A horse gallops across a darkening sky, a figure sweeps down through the air, and an infant passes from one outstretched pair of hands to another.