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Monday 10 August 2020

Visual Commentary on Scripture: Back from the Brink

This week’s Visual Commentary on Scripture exhibition is 'Back from the Brink' on Daniel 4.

'Immediately the word was fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from among men, and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles’ feathers, and his nails were like birds’ claws.' (Daniel 4:33)

Explore this chapter with William Blake's Nebuchadnezzar, 1795–c.1805, Arthur Boyd's Nebuchadnezzar's Dream of the Tree, 1969, and Peter Howson's The Third Step, 2001.

Links to the individual works and their associated commentaries are shared daily during the first part of the week on @TheVCS (Twitter) and @www.theVCS.org (Facebook) so that you can focus on them one at a time. A link to the longer ‘comparative commentary’ follows on Thursdays.

'Back from the Brink' is the first VCS exhibition that I have prepared. 

In a small example of synchronicity I am currently reviewing the 'Lucas Cranach: Artist and Innovator' exhibition at Compton Verney. The medieval legend of the penance of St John Chrysostom may well have been influenced by the story of Nebuchadnezzar, as told in Daniel 4. Blake based Nebuchadnezzar’s pose in his print on Albrecht Dürer’s late fifteenth-century woodcut showing this medieval legend. The Cranach exhibition includes an engraving also based on Dürer’s woodcut. This engraving has recently inspired a work by Raquib Shaw, which is the same show. So, I am writing about these two pieces in the same week that these related images are being featured on the VCS site.

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Arvo Pärt - Sabat Mater.

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