Before and after Raphael

We’ve been visiting Cheryl’s parents for a couple of days so last Friday I took the opportunity to explore Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery.  The first lesson was not to ignore provincial galleries.  Here we find works by Bellini, Martini, Murillo, Botticelli, Rubens, Pissarro and others.  Not as many as Paris, London or Milan, but quality paintings nonetheless.

But the gallery is famous for its collection of Pre-Raphaelites.  The work of those pretentious young Victorians who believed art had ‘gone wrong’ after Raphael & the Renaissance and so looked to produce paintings inspired by earlier works and ideas.

A key work of the movement is William Holman Hunt’s ‘Finding the Saviour in the Temple’, part of Birmingham’s collection.

Begun on his first visit to the Holy Land, the subject is deliberately less common, a sort of Protestant variation on the Annunciation or Madonna & Child.   Holman Hunt paints Mary and Jesus as very human figures (rather than the idealised forms of Italian art).

 

The ‘teachers of the law’ are a study in various responses to Jesus’ teaching (from the blinds Pharisee clinging on to the scroll of the ‘old’ law to the fat self-satisfied character at the other end of the row. 

 

The child on the left kisses the Torah scroll in a ritualistic gesture contrasting to the child Jesus’ new teaching.

 

Outside a blinds beggar awaits the healing of an adilt Jesus (he will receive sight while the Pharisee remains blinds) and the old temple is still being completed as a keystone is lifted into place (on cross-shaped scaffolding) while “the stone the builders rejected” is hugged by his mother.

 

On the wall behind Jesus is a quote from Malachi, "The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple"

Next to this the Holy Spirit hovers (more of a pigeon than a dove):

While outside a flock of pigeons fly in to join him, looking like a formation of spitfires from a Battle of Britain film (perhaps they remember the less happy end for two pigeons last time Jesus' parents brought him to the Temple:

Speaking of which, a couple in the background bring their child with the 'proper' offering of a lamb (rather than the 'poor person's offering of two pigeons Luke tells us Jesus' parents brought).
So a lamb is offered under the old covenant even as the 'lamb of God' himself appears in the temple.

Even the picture frame contrasts Moses serpent representing the Old Covenant with the cross representing the New:

In all the picture is alive with symbolism which is both the glory and the shortcoming of so many Pre-Raphaelite paintings.  'Glory' because it provides a rich tapestry of design and glorious detail but 'shortcoming' in that the 'photo-realism' is so overwhelming the paintings tend to look unrealistic.

In the very act of trying to faithfully reproduce every detail, the Pre-Raphaelites failed to recognise that this is neither how the human eye sees the world, nor the role of artists who usually seek to draw out significant parts of a painting by contrasting sharp detail with paler or impressionistic backgrounds. 

Their revival of Christian subject matter makes them interesting but their attempt to 'restart' the history of art from early Renaissance roots ultimately fails.