Ecce Homo: Representations of Christ as the Model of Masculinity in Victorian Art and Lives of Jesus

Abstract

Holman Hunt’s painting the’ shadow of Death’ was first exhibited in 1873 and, as the accompanying catalogue makes clear, the attempt to create ‘authentic’ representations of Christ’s humanity, either on canvas or in print, was a major literary, artistic and theological preoccupation of the second half of the Victorian period. Orthodox Christians such as Hunt and the Anglican clergyman Frederick William Farrar, whose Life of Christ was published the year after ‘The Shadow of Death’ was first exhibited, felt themselves to be enlisted in a battle to defend the credibility of the gospel narratives. This, they feared, had been seriously impugned by the sceptical presuppositions underpinning works such as Strauss’s Leben Jesu, which appeared in an English translation by George Eliot in 1845, and Renan’s Vie de Jesus of 1863.2 One of the means by which Christian writers and artists sought to accomplish this task was by recourse to detailed archaeological, geographical and ethnographical research. As is well known, a number of Holman Hunt’s religious pictures were based on painstaking observation in the Holy Land and it was on his arrival in Jerusalem in 1869 that he first read Renan, having previously been warned that the book threatened to overturn entirely his faith in the veracity of the gospel writers. The research which he carried out there for ‘The Shadow of Death’ and the final painting itself represent a quite explicit engagement with the questions of historical methodology raised by Renan.3 In the same way, as preparation for writing a life of Christ which was widely regarded as the most convincing nineteenth-century defence of the traditional view, Farrar visited Palestine in 1870.4 As the evangelical Christian Observer noted approvingly, ‘many things came home to him for the first time, with a reality and vividness unknown before’5 — as if somehow the accumulation of minute historical and ethnographical detail could stem the rising tide of scientific, biblical critical and moral objections to orthodox faith.