‘A Martin Luther in Painting’
Sir David Wilkie's Unfinished Christ before Pilate
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21158725 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jo Briggs (0000-0002-4041-1918, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 33-56 |
| Publication date | 2011-02-25 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Visual Culture in Britain (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1471-4787 • E-ISSN: 1941-8361 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14714787.2011.541201 |
| OpenAlex | W1988145991 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
Immediately before his death in 1841 Sir David Wilkie undertook a journey to the Middle East to make on-the-spot studies of the Holy Land for paintings he hoped would set new standards for religious art. Owing to Wilkie's untimely death no complete paintings resulted from this trip, but his aims were ambitious and worthy of further scrutiny. Wilkie had declared that ‘a Martin Luther in painting’ was needed to replace centuries of Catholic dogma and inaccuracy with a new and more rational school of Protestant Bible painting. By focusing on an unfinished oil sketch of Christ before Pilate I seek to contextualize this significant but neglected area of Wilkie's practice. I place this sketch, and Wilkie's project more generally, in the context of print culture and the emerging discipline of biblical archaeology to consider how his mission brought an imperialist agenda into conjunction with popular religious belief. Wilkie's firsthand observations in the Holy Land challenged his reforming mission, and the breakdown of his project, recorded in his letters and journals, reveals tensions within his broader artistic practice that pre-empt simplistic distinctions of self and other, faith and art, image and text
Art · Art history · Faith · Gunpowder · Literature · Painting · Protestantism · Scrutiny · Sketch · Theology · Vision · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Philosophy · Religious studies
| Citations per year | 0.07 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2012 - 2012 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |