Religion

Religion

• Comissioned by Linnell to illustrate Book of Job - addresses evil and suffering 
• God and Satan test limits of endurance by forcing Job to undergo trials to test dedication
• Satan pours boil (left hand, devils hand), ref Blake's Jerusalem poem 'every boil upin my body is a seperate and deadly sin'

Revolutionary

• Suffering- Blake rejected from Academy and lived in poverty, had mixed religious views
• Satan beautiful, classicised Michelangelo-like, ref Paradise Lost, seen in Blake's other painting
• Wanted revolution, but didn't like industrial revolution as seen in The Tyger
• Unacademic- Reyonolds: 'reason ought to preside', Blake: 'devlish foolish thing to be an artist

Romantic

• Medieval art- purity, mystery, nature shows influence of Gothic
• Sublime in pathetic fallacy, Romantic themes of horror, suffering, fear, evil psyche of man
• Influence of visions and Swedenborg, 'Songs of Experience' and Mary Shelley

Description

• Holy family without traditional symbols, John as awkward youth holding water (baptism), Joseph balding, sunburnt (based on carptenter in Oxford), St. Anne old
• Jesus' hand wounds ref cruxifiction, willow circle- crown of thorns, ladder- deposition
• Dove- holy spirit, Mary and Jesus in traditional blue and white

Unconventional

• Victorian genre painting not Renaissance setting, look impoverished, dirty toes, visceral blood 
• Mary's lack of divine dignity, kneels on dirty floor, Dickens said she was a monster who would 'stand out in the lowest gin shp in England or the highest Cabaret in France'
• Extreme detail and sharp focus- controverisal technique

Tractarianism 

• Ritual based, more Catholic, Millais may have hear lectures on it at Oxford
• Focus on Mary more Catholic, sheep seperated from family like the congregation

Traditional/ Modern

• Early Renaissance- fresco paintings with washed out colours, Fra Angelico's simplicity
• Gothic in elongated, frail form, traditional lily angled towards womb
• Flat haloes, holy spirit as dove but wears contemporary nightshirt, not in Renaissnce temple

Innovative

• Exaggerated foreshortening- more intimate, Gabriel without more wing- supernatural
• Mary normally blonde, but red haired and pale- Victorian ideal of beauty
• Young and scared, unwilling to take phallic lily, sexual awakening and puberty
• Gabriel threatening, naked under robe

Threat

• Mary head of Catholic church- mystical imagery of Tractarianism
• 'Perversion of talent', Rossetti said he's never exhibit again, but naturalism supported by Ruskin in letter to The Times 1851