quite unlike the type which Raphael has made traditional. It is
masculine--even rugged--seamed with lines of care, and filled with an
expression of yearning. There is anxiety and almost timidity in his pose
as he listens for an answer to his knock. The nails and bolts of the
door are rusted; it is overgrown with ivy and the tall stalks and flat
umbels of fennel. The sill is choked with nettles and other weeds,
emblems all of the long sleep of the world which Christ comes to break.
The full moon makes a halo behind his head and shines through the low
boughs of an orchard, whose apples strew the dark grass in the
foreground, sown with spots of light from the star-shaped perforations in
the lantern-cover. They are the apples of Eden, emblems of the Fall.
Everything, in fact, is symbolical. Christ's seamless white robe, with
its single heavy fold, typifies the Church catholic; the jewelled clasps
of the priestly mantle, one square and one oval, are the Old and New
Testaments. The golden crown is enwoven with one of thorns, from which
new leaves are sprouting. The richly embroidered mantle hem has its
meaning, and so have the figures on the lantern. To get the light in
this picture right, Hunt painted out of doors in an orchard every
moonlight night for three months from nine o'clock till five. While
working in his studio, he darkened one end of the room, put a lantern in
the hand of his lay-figure and painted this interior through the hole in
a curtain. On moonlight nights he let the moon shine in through the
window to mix with the lantern light. It was a principle with the
Brotherhood that detail, though not introduced for its own sake, should
be painted with truth to nature. Hunt, especially, took infinite pains
to secure minute exactness in his detail. Ruskin wrote in enthusiastic
praise of the colours of the gems on the mantle clasp in "The Light of
the World," and said that all the Academy critics and painters together
could not have executed one of the nettle leaves at the bottom of the
picture. The lizards in the foreground of Millais' "Ferdinand Lured by
Ariel" (exhibited in 1850) were studied from life, and Scott makes merry
over the shavings on the floor of the carpenter shop in the same artist's
"Christ in the House of his Parents," a composition which was ferociously
ridiculed by Dickens in "Household Words."

The symbolism which is so pronounced a feature in "The Light of the
World" is common to