“The scene is in the house-porch, where Christ holds a bowl of blood from which Zacharias is sprinkling the posts and lintel. Joseph has brought the lamb and Elisabeth lights the pyre. The shoes which John fastens and the bitter herbs which Mary is gathering form part of the ritual.”But not all of these details are in the picture, which DGR left unfinished: in particular, neither Joseph nor Elizabeth appear in the scene. Surtees' comments pick up other important details:
“By the opening of the well on the extreme left two pieces of wood tied together with string form a Cross to which the water-cask is attached. The opening framed by a vine, behind the foreground figures, reveals a table in an interior, set with bread and wine”(
DGR's letter to Coventry Patmore about the picture is quite important:
“Its chief claim to interest, if successful when complete, would be as a
subject which must actually have occurred during every year of the life led by the Holy
Family, and which I think must bear its meaning broadly and instantly—not as you
say
The
event interests DGR because it illustrates his belief that spiritual agency must be
‘remotely’
—on the very face of
it,—in the one sacrifice really typical of the other.”“inherent in the fact.”
His picture, he says,
“differs entirely from . . . the very many both ancient and modern which
resemble it in so far as they are illustrations of Christ's life
‘subject
to his parents,’
but not one of which that I can remember is anything
more than an entire and often trifling fancy of the painter, in which the symbolism is not
really inherent in the fact, but merely suggested or suggestible, and having had the fact
made to fit it”Correspondence, 55.54)
The picture thus helps to explain both the difference and the continuity between his early
work, with its Christian preoccupations, and his later work, where pagan materials get more
elaborated. DGR is interested in Christianity because it is a mythos of real spiritual
presence and not of merely symbolic forms; and he is interested
in “Pre-Raphaelite”
or Medieval Christianity because he
saw in that culture the signs of a belief in real spiritual presence. For DGR, the Renaissance
(and its attendant religious reformations) represented a great collapse of spiritual values
and the emergence of “soulless self-reflections of man's
skill”
in art and culture.
DGR is not a Christian, for he is as interested in pagan and polytheist spiritual presences
as he is in Christian and monotheist ones. The double interest is evident early, most
especially in the work that centers in Arthurian and stil novisti materials.
So in a picture like
Such works raise important aesthetic issues. DGR values and imitates the European
primitivists for one crucial reason: their art demonstrates a belief in real spiritual
presence. This means for DGR that the artistic practice is itself a spiritual
agency—it does not observe from a distance, and in perspective, but possesses what
he called an“inner standing point.”
Works like
The work transcends its own conceptual horizon in two respects, however. First, its lack of
finish proves a distinct strength, as it does in
WMR says that a picture on this subject was begun in 1849 (“Virgin planting a lily and a rose, and the Virgin in St.
John's house after the crucifixion”
(WMR, “a remarkable insight into the artist's working
methods,”
as Grieve has noted (
Ruskin's interest in this picture made it a fairly well-known work in DGR's lifetime.
For DGR the picture treated the Passover in“its actuality as an incident
no less than as a
(‘scriptural’
type”Correspondence
“too
remote and unobvious”
to Patmore, and wholly nonsymbolic to Ruskin (“that Rossetti's essentially Catholic
conception of
(‘scriptural types’
or figurae—learned, very likely, from Dante—is in direct opposition
to the spirit of Protestant literalism”
DGR was well aware that his picture bore near similarities to “very many
both ancient and modern”
pictures. He insisted on the special character of
what he was trying to represent: “not one of [these other pictures] that I
can remember is anything more than an entire and often trifling fancy of the painter, in
which the symbolism is not really inherent in the fact, but merely suggested or suggestible,
and having had the fact made to fit it”
(Correspondence
The subject takes up the prescriptions for the rites of the Passover, as set out in