1 of 5
We have impatient eyes. In our video age, we expect that one picture will be replaced by another as fast as our brains can take them in. We flatter ourselves that we are the most sophisticated viewers ever, when all the while we demand images so crude, they can be exhausted in the blink of an eye.
|
|
|
|
We are impatient in a different way with sacred art—impatient with its very right to exist. Secular viewers would prefer to imagine that religious motivation inevitably produces bad art. Urbane Christians are so afraid of being caught endorsing propaganda that they shy away from the very art that expresses their own vision of the world—however good it might be.
Hence the Pre-Raphaelites continue to unsettle us, just as they did many of their contemporaries. Critics seem always to be looking for a way to set them aside without having to go so far as actually to claim that their art lacks merit. In Michaela Giebelhausen's Painting the Bible: Representation and Belief in Mid-Victorian Britain, however, the art of the Brotherhood receives a welcome, genuinely sympathetic treatment.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and the other Pre-Raphaelites were rebelling against the high art conventions of their day. They stood for paintings that were infused with meaning, often through symbolism, and executed with realism and meticulous attention to nature. Their self-chosen name was a deliberate provocation: what if medieval art was in some ways better than that of the Renaissance? (Charles Dickens was sufficiently scandalized to write a satire in which he projected the emergence of a Pre-Galileo Brotherhood which would deny that the earth revolves around the sun.) And yet, the glories of the Renaissance notwithstanding, the way its artists flouted realism was assailable. John Ruskin, a seminal intellectual inspiration for the Brotherhood, objected that the apostles in Raphael's Christ's Charge to Peter were "a faded concoction of fringes, muscular arms, and curly heads of Greek philosophers."
The Pre-Raphaelites admired leading medieval religious painters such as Fra Angelico and Giotto for their earnestness and sincerity: they patently believed the Christian truths that their art depicted. Ruskin observed that art used to be a way of communicating faith, but the great themes of faith were now cynically employed simply for the sake of displaying artistic prowess. He grumbled about the typical modern artist who thought of a picture of the Madonna merely as "a pleasant piece of furniture for the corner of a boudoir." The Pre-Raphaelites wagered their artistic reputations and lives on the premise that it need not be so. In our irony-soaked, "post"-everything age, we need them. Most of all, we need Holman Hunt.
Judith Bronkhurst's William Holman Hunt: A Catalogue Raisonné; should be gratefully accepted as a gift to our age. A century from now, should the world endure, these volumes from Yale will be on display in some museum. A guide will speak reverently of them in hushed tones, conceding that having all of our images stored electronically is an advance in many ways, but lamenting that such physically beautiful objects as these are no longer being created. Her listeners will dream of owning these books the way that we dream of owning the original paintings they depict.
Mostly, these volumes are a gift to us because they can serve to re-train our impatient eyes, challenge our dismissiveness toward sacred art, and function as a catalogue of hope for those who have reached a cultural dead end. Unfortunately, neither Giebelhausen nor Bronkhurst is quite as sure-footed as Virgil when it comes to guiding us on this journey. Indeed, although Bronkhurst makes a few passing references to the evangelical influence on Hunt's life and work, she is so unfamiliar with this terrain as to speak dismissively of "a bias toward evangelicanism [sic]."
share this page
RSS Feed
