Light and Darkness: J. M. W. Turner and the Bible

Abstract

If Turner (1775–1851) was, like Hölderlin, eclectic in his artistic borrowings, the effect was quite opposite: not a binding of Scripture into a seamless unity of vision, but an exposure of biblical paradigms to the blinding light of the artist’s eye and the threatening chaos of nineteenth-century ‘progress’ and discovery. Turner, as an artist, is the poet of Coleridge’s ‘Limbo’:

… thou from the first

Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread

Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss

And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark

Illumine, what is low raise and support.

(John Milton, Paradise Lost 1:19–23)