Sacred fire ministries4/19/2023 ![]() In explaining the ceremony, he displays sympathy for the naive beliefs of the superstitious pilgrims, most of whom, he points out, "have accumulated the means for the sacred journey only by years of self denial. He included a key-plate, a general explanation of the ceremony, and an anthology of travellers" descriptions of it throughout the ages. The Hogarthian tone and method of The Miracle of the Holy Fire are emphasized for the spectator by the catalogue Hunt prepared - or had prepared under his supervision - for the exhibition of his picture at the New Gallery Hunt, who had attacked the corruption of English missionary practices in his 1858 pamphlet, returned to the fray four decades later as a pamphleteer in paint. By the time he came to paint this scene emblematic of institutionalized superstition, much of its topicality had been lost, but it still bore important meanings for him, since it satirized established, conventional Christianity. As he wrote to Tupper in 1877, "How Stanley can desire union for our Church with the Greek perpetrators of miraculous fire I can't understand" (15 July 1877 London (Huntington MS.). It was his response to those ecumenically minded Anglicans who proposed in the late 1870s and '80s to join with the Greek, Armenian, Russian, and other Orthodox Churches. During the ceremony the Greek Patriarch in the holy city produced a candle supposedly lit by heavenly powers or angelic visitation, and for the painter it had a specific topical reference. For him the Easter Eve rite in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre represented the degeneration of authentic religious wonder into selfishness, superstition, and worse - into mad frenzy and unchristian violence. ![]() The Miracle of the Holy Fire, which Hunt painted almost forty years after first seeing the ceremony in Jerusalem, is the most explicitly satirical, most Hogarthian of his pictures. “ William Holman Hunt's "Oriental Mania" and His Uffizi Self-portrait”.“ William Holman Hunt and the Missionaries”.“ Shadows Cast by The Light of the World: William Holman Hunt's Religious Paintings, 1893-1905”.Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Seed of David Epilogue Related Materials.Dante Gabriel Rossetti's"Mary's Girlhood".Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "For An Annunciation, Early German".Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "For a Virgin and Child, by Hans Memmelinck".Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Passover in the Holy Family.Charles Collins's The Pedlar or Berengaria's alarm.Typological Symbolism in the Works of Other Members of the Pre-Raphaelite Circle May Morning on Magdalen Tower and The Lady of Shalott Chapter Three.The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple.The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple and Pre-Raphaelite Compositional Schemes.A Converted British Family sheltering a Christian Priest from the Persecution of the Druids.Typological Symbolism in Hunt's Major Works ![]()
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