Newton

Blake's monoprint of Isaac Newton is not a celebration. Newton sits naked on an undersea rock surrounded by vivid geology — lichen, coral, the moving sea — and ignores all of it. His eyes are fixed on a compass measuring a small diagram on a scroll. Blake despised Newton's mechanical worldview. He painted him as a self-imprisoned thinker — pure reason as a kind of blindness. The British Library now uses the image as a science icon — the precise opposite of what Blake intended. Now at Tate Britain, London @tate