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From http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/poynter/paintings/16.html
Commentary by George P. Landow
...
As Angus Trumble explains, Poynter conceived his picture within an architectural apparatus of startling complexity and truthfulness both to literary sources — the Book of Kings mentioned costly stone foundations, pillars and beams made from cedars of Lebanon, lavish ornamentation of gold and brass, and the King's magnificent ivory throne with its six steps flanked by twelve lions — and to evidence made available by archaeological excavations in Mesopotamia and other parts of the Near East. It swarmed with detail, figures and objects, even animals, that brought to life the legendary court of King Solomon, son of King David, heir to the Kingdom of Israel, builder of the Temple in Jerusalem.
The Old Testament account of the visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon has been interpreted and reinterpreted in the light of changing historical circumstances and values ever since it was first told. According to the Book of Kings rumours reached the Queen of Sheba concerning the fame of King Solomon. Boldly, she came to test his mind and wisdom with riddles. To her questions Solomon provided answers, meeting her symbolic challenge with all the power and prestige and authority of a Jewish king of Israel. The Queen of Sheba was overwhelmed by the impact of "all the wisdom of Solomon, the house that he had built, the food of his table, the seating of his officials and the attendance of his servants, their clothing, his cupbearers, and his burnt offerings," such that "there was no more spirit in her."
The setting is the great reception hall in the palace of King Solomon, which the critics unanimously applauded as a tour-de-force of learned architectural reconstruction. Assyrian and Persian discoveries provided Poynter with a great deal of material with which to work on decorative details and furnishings. The lions were copied from exempla in the collections of the British Museum, as were Egyptian musical instruments and the dozens of plates, cups, bowls, and other vessels being inspected by one of peace strutting in the right foreground. Nor was Poynter's imagination constrained by the absence of genuine Israelite antiquities to incorporate into the huge composition. The ivory throne was largely his own invention, as were most of the costumes, intelligently informed by extensive historical research, a host of preparatory drawings and a scale model the architecture which Poynter had constructed so that might observe in three dimensions various effects of light with maximum precision throughout the long period in which he laboured over the painting. [p. 166]
Like Hunt, Laurence Alma-Tadema, Edwin Long, Poynter used a combination of research and imagination to create a scene from ancient life. Like these three other painters, his extraordinarily detailed rendering of a scene from the ancient Near East used the techniques and assumptions of modern realism to permit spectators to experience life in the ancient past. Unlike Hunt but like Tadema and Long, Poynter, who just wanted an accurate representation of an ancient event, had no interest in using biblical symbolism to prophecy the coming of Christianity or to turn the scene into one that existed both as an historical event and as a form of mystical experience. Such an approach, unlike Hunt's (or Millais's in his early Christ in the House of His Parents), made The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon far more accessible to late-Victorian audiences.
Despite this fundamentally different approach to depicting scriptural events, this painting shares some interesting similarities to Hunt's Finding: each painting has an outsider — Poynter's Queen of Sheba and Hunt's young Jesus — enter a lavishly rendered space within which the encounters confronts those in power and then reacts to that experience: typically, Hunt, the rebel, has the young Jesus experience an epiphany in which he first recognizes his own power whereas the conservative Poynter presents his outsider as awed, even cowed, by the establishment. Each man ends up revealing a great deal about his stance toward society and those in power.
[ 本帖最后由 jasonnewman 于 2007-8-2 23:25 编辑 ] |
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