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Article: ILLUMINATED GOSPELS 'SEEING SALVATION' AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY.
- Article from:
- Contemporary Review
- Article date:
- April 1, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Contemporary Review Company Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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ONE enters the National Gallery's latest exhibition, Seeing Salvation, with a sigh. There, dominant in the first room, is the most shunnable platitude in British religious art, although once so revered in its three versions that this one, from St Paul's Cathedral, was sent on a tour of the Empire in Edwardian times: William Holman Hunt's Light of the World. At one time adverse criticism of this image would have been thought almost as blasphemous as words spoken against its subject. Vulgar from the two-tone halo to the bare swollen toes protruding from the samite robe, from the heavily jewelled collar of the dalmatic to the lantern decorated with the starry firmament of ...