The Whore of Babylon

Blake's Whore of Babylon derives from Revelation 17-18, in which the great harlot seated on many waters, drunk with the blood of saints, represents the corrupt world-system that the apocalyptic vision condemns. Blake's interpretive framework identified the Whore with the empiricist materialism and institutional religion he condemned throughout his prophetic books, making this Revelation figure a vehicle for his deepest political and spiritual convictions. His version would have brought his characteristic synthesis of classical body and apocalyptic energy to a subject already charged with centuries of Protestant interpretation.

Blake's figure of the Whore would combine the grand classical pose he favored for major mythological and biblical figures with the symbolic attributes from Revelation — the cup, the golden dress, the beast beneath her. His color in mature biblical watercolors tends toward strong, unrealistic chromatic fields that express spiritual rather than naturalistic reality.