Tea at Trianon: The Surprising Sacred Art of the Pre-Raphaelites

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, April 9, 2022

The Surprising Sacred Art of the Pre-Raphaelites

I love the pre-Raphaelites and made a special trip to the Tate Britain while in London to see some of their work. From Aleteia:

This band of brothers – and one part-time sister – wanted to turn back the clock to a less polished era. Above beauty and artifice they valued realism. They were not averse to Raphael’s love of religious themes, nor were they put off by the papal commissions that the 16^th-century master relied on. It was not really Raphael himself they objected to; for these young rebels he cannot have seemed like an old fogey as he died at the age of 37. They just visualized things differently.
Perhaps the most brutally honest reworking of a sacred theme was Christ in the House of His Parents by J.E. Millais. Few paintings scandalized Victorian society as much as this one, shown at London’s Royal Academy in 1850. Where was the grandeur or good looks of the First Family of Christianity? The Pre-Raphaelite concern for realism had introduced, according to The Times: “misery, dirt and even disease.” Charles Dickens was alarmingly offended by the physical appearance of Jesus: “a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-haired boy in a nightshirt.” There was also “a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness that she would stand out from the rest of the company in the vilest cabaret in France.”
Seldom has such scorn been poured onto a painting in which so much symbolism has been cleverly inserted. The most important element is the wound on Jesus’s hand as the blood drips onto his foot. (Read more.)