The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve

Never represented in the Bible itself, this late Blake is emblematic of the artist’s rebellious approach to the religious subject matter, wherein familiar events within the Christian timeline are represented in distorted, unexpected ways. Cain, Adam, and Eve all have Michelangelesque ideal bodies but distorted in different ways. Adam is straightforwardly stunned; Cain is distorted from the perspective of the viewer, possibly reflecting his guilt and misery. Eve, however, has deflated over the body of his son; she no longer has the recognizable proportions of a natural human body, possibly representing the enormous toll that the grief has taken upon her. The unnatural lighting, reminiscent of an eclipse, represents a lack of enlightenment and ability to see. In turn, the dark strip of the grave separates Cain from his parents and the rest of the scene. Though he once assaulted a British army soldier outside his house, Blake disliked violence. He castigated his poetic predecessors Milton and Shakespeare for being ‘slaves of the sword’ in their glamorization of it. In his poems, such as ‘London,’ the emotions produced by unredeemed violence become the building blocks for regimes of oppression and terror; here, Blake traces the political violence taking place during his own time back to its Biblical origins.