In 1939, Salvador Dalí was expelled from the Surrealist movement and declared that he would pursue the remainder of his artistic career as a classicist. It was not long after this that he renewed the Roman Catholic faith of his childhood, and turned at least some of his attention to portraying traditional Christian subject matter over the next few decades, albeit with a distinct Surrealist taste for the visionary (or the hallucinatory), which the artist described as part of the traditional Spanish propensity for the mystical as exemplified by 16th-century poet and writer St. John of the Cross, author of Dark Night of the Soul.

Among the best known and successful of these Catholic subjects is Dalí’s Vision of Saint John of the Cross, from 1951 (now in Glasgow), for which the artist prepared a large, breathtaking red-chalk drawing that is in the current exhibition of Dalí’s work at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (through December). The striking and unusual perspective so masterfully executed is of the crucified Christ seen from above. It is one of the best and most classical of his pieces in the exhibit, if classicism is taken to mean stylistic harmony, order, unity, and “noble simplicity,” as art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann described it in the 18th century. Most of the work in the current exhibit, however, shows no signs of classical order and restraint, but rather reflects an almost Baroque sense of exuberant (or terrifying) complexity, movement, and chaos.

As if in search of Dalí’s classicism, the exhibit brings together not only the artist’s late work (after 1939) but also pieces dating to the 1920s, along with the work of old masters of European art from the museum’s permanent collection. This includes not only Bosch and Bruegel, but also El Greco, Zurbarán, Velasquez, Vermeer, and other Dutch Baroque artists, as well as that early 19th-century master of fantasy, Francisco Goya. Although the Dalí paintings are similar to the earlier masters in their technique of oil glazing and in their attention to detail, the subject matter in these paintings, including those executed after 1939, is anything but classical. It continues his earlier Surrealist pursuit of the hallucinatory and the incongruous, executed with an obsessive miniaturist’s eye for lucidity and precision, even when he turns his attention to Christian subjects.

He famously stated his intention of creating, with a camera’s accuracy, the dreamscape of the unconscious mind, the frontiers within, so to speak, producing “hand-painted dream photographs,” as he called them. The best of these follow his idiosyncratic obsessions wherever they take him, and include cannibalism, being devoured by insects, decaying donkey carcasses, rigidity in soft materials or softness in rigid objects, crutches supporting drooping substances, and pianos or jugs morphing into faces. These same hallucinogenic qualities characterize his religious works made after his return to Catholicism, but it is difficult to interpret what they might mean in this new Christian context.

In Dalí’s figure, clearly based on Michelangelo, the left hand rises as if to shield him from being recognized by paparazzi. Dalí’s figure loses all sense of composure and balance that Jesus has in the Michelangelo, and seemingly becomes a neurotic overcome with grief or shame who cannot even bear to look at the viewer. In fact, the face of Christ is usually not shown in these postwar Christian subjects by Dalí, and at least in one case, the visage of Christ is substituted with a masculine face of his wife, Gala, as in his Last Supper, in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington.

Gala also appears in Ecumenical Council as St. Helen (the mother of Constantine), but she seems miscast in this role, and the overly realistic (but beautifully rendered) portrayal of her is never believable as anything other than Gala posing in a costume. She looks directly and somewhat uneasily at the viewer, while below, Dalí glances away from his uninscribed canvas to something or someone just to the viewer’s left, as if momentarily distracted. In the heavens above float bishops and councils, like clouds rendered with a transparency and lightness that suggest dreams or opiated fantasies. An Annunciation also seems to be taking place in the sky, no doubt another historical quotation.

But what are St. Helen, a terrified, nearly nude, colossal, faceless Christ, swarms of tiny bishops and prelates and an Annunciation supposed to signify? It is not easy to discern what the artist meant to convey.

I suppose it may reflect a general optimism for the leadership of the newly elected Pope John XXIII, who in the previous year had welcomed the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Vatican, and who was shortly to call the Second Vatican Council (in Roman Catholic parlance, the 21st ecumenical council, though not defined as such by Anglicans). But the elements in the Dalí painting do not add up to any discernable meaning, as far as I can see. More like a fever dream or an acid trip than a mystical vision, paintings like this are classical only in their technique.

Despite the failure of most of his religious subjects, in my opinion, the exhibit in Boston presents a cogent overview of the artist’s Surrealist period of the 1930s, including some of his best work from that decade, and so the show is worthwhile. Unfortunately, there is no catalogue for the exhibit.

Biographer Ian Gibson has suggested that Dalí’s embrace of Catholicism was part of ingratiating himself with the fascist government of Spain after the war, which was vehemently Catholic. He was previously removed from the Surrealist group because of his portrayal of fascist leaders in his work, including Hitler.

Almost all of Dalí’s Catholic work is characterized by this insincerity — it always seems so forced and artificial. In his Vision of Saint John of the Cross, however, the artist is illustrating not his own but someone else’s vision, based on the saint’s description of his transcendent experience. Its authenticity in Dalí’s Catholic oeuvre is unique.

In Pay Close Attention (2020), the composition is tripartite and resembles a triptych with a broad central panel and wings. The 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece is one of the most familiar works in this format. A grisly representation of the crucifixion dominates the central panel, flanked by saints on the side panels, whose lives are related to the theme of suffering.

The painting was originally designed as an altarpiece for the chapel in a hospice where monks treated the victims of ergot poisoning. Such poisoning causes lesions in the skin similar to those represented on Christ’s body, thus demonstrating for patients that Jesus understood them and shared in their suffering. Beyond its artistic merit, it was intended to promote healing. Healing, both individual and societal, is also an important aspiration of Jones’s work.

In Pay Close Attention, behind the central circular form with the fish, sideways and partially hidden from view, peers the face of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old youth who was tragically killed in 2012 by a community watch volunteer. The ensuing trial garnered national publicity, and the photo of Martin wearing the hoodie became a widely reproduced symbol of resistance.

In the context of Jones’s work, it refers to an unjust death corresponding to the crucifixion in the Isenheim, not explicitly stated but merely alluded to. It is a ghostly and haunting image that might at first go unnoticed, a subtext for a narrative of suffering. But whereas Christ’s suffering had a higher purpose, the death of Martin is an unmitigated, senseless, and thoroughly avoidable tragedy. He is treated here as a martyr, like the St. Sebastian shown in the left panel of the Isenheim triptych.

Although the format of the Jones painting is analogous to a three-paneled altarpiece, it also bears a resemblance to traditional Ifa boards, sometimes referred to as divination trays, used by the Yoruba and Fon peoples of West Africa and incorporated into diaspora spiritual practices. In traditional Yoruba cosmology, God delegates his power to the orishas, invisible spirit beings he created to help administer the cosmos, which are similar to angels. Two orishas mediate divination or “fortune telling”: Eshu (also known as Legba), the “master of the crossroads,” and Ifa, sometimes identified as the orisha of destiny.

In the Yoruba divination board shown here, the face of Eshu/Legba is shown on both sides of the plate, so his image is facing both the client and the diviner, a ritual technician who interprets and sits across from the client during a consultation. To open the ceremony, a cross is traced by the diviner in the central dish to represent the crossroads (both a sacred site and an allegory of free choice). On the sides of the cross are symbols of eternity and renewal in the ribbon-like figure eight form on the left, as well as the intertwined stylized snakes on the right. Although the snake is associated with evil and temptation in the Abrahamic religions, in West African narratives, it is most often a sign of new beginnings and resurrection, because the snake sheds its skin periodically and emerges from its old casing “reborn.”

Cowrie shells are cast in the tray multiple times during a consultation, and the position of the shells is interpreted by the diviner as a revelation of the person’s Ifa. Ifa is the only orisha that is never represented in art. Often interpreted as “destiny,” it is more properly translated as “potential,” according to some scholars, because nothing is fixed or predestined in Yoruba cosmology.

Instead, the universe is ruled by the principle of synchronicity, a radical interdependence of all things as free agents before the threshold of an undetermined future. A person’s Ifa is what God intends for that person’s life. Of course, people may not live up to their “destiny.” But then Ifa tells us not what is to be, but only what might be, with God’s help and perhaps a little bit of luck (Eshu/Legba, a trickster, is the orisha of accident and chance).

The fish that traverses the platter in Jones’s painting recalls both the miracle of the multiplication of fishes by Christ, as well as suggesting contemporary ecological concerns, along with the solar panels and the pine forest just barely visible in the background of the central “panel” upon closer inspection. Cowrie shells have already apparently been cast and are represented in the painting as a direct reference to the ancient tradition of Ifa.

Jones places the viewer at the very center of the divining tray/altarpiece, at the crossroads. The “dice” have been cast and we are presented with a “reading” that involves two alternative paths in the side panels, two moral choices: a downward spiral on the left, and an upward, enlightened path to progress on the right, not unlike the damned and the saved in a traditional representation of the Last Judgment.

The left “panel” depicts a crumpled dollar bill and a strong, zigzag arrow pointing downward with an intertwined upward arrow in the same configuration as the snakes in the divination dish. Another zigzag shape pointing downward overlays the photo of a burning building, and includes a portrait of Sandra Bland, who died in the custody of police under suspicious circumstances. Like Trayvon Martin, her photo is placed sideways. She is surrounded by a halo of dots — another martyr. The zigzags also suggest lightning bolts, the symbolic attribute of the orisha of divine justice, Shango. The double-headed ax at the bottom of the central part of the composition is also a sign of this spirit.

The right “panel” or section of this work is more optimistic in tone, with its strong upward thrust in African Nationalist colors. The schematic eye on the bottom brings to mind both the ancient Egyptian stylized manner of representation and the Hamsa, a Jewish folk protection against the “evil eye.” The lightbulb, as enlightenment, reveals within itself a rich blue sky punctuated by cumulous clouds. It contains, on a small, easily overlooked scale, the sign of the cross, a symbol of Christian redemption but also the sign of the crossroads and thus individual and collective choice and agency, the realm of Eshu/Legba.

According to tradition, this orisha has been given the task of dispensing ashe, the life force similar to the Christian concept of grace. According to Nigerian art historian Babatunde Lawal, ashe is “the power to make things happen,” and implies not merely the passive dispensation of grace but an active, enlivening power that is accessible through divining the will of God and acting as an agent of his intentions in transforming the world. Ben Jones is just such a mystical agent of ashe.

Dr. Dennis Raverty is a retired associate professor of art history, who has taught the art of West Africa and the African diaspora, and published widely on African American art. He gives frequent presentations, both live and online.

The principal figure in the composition of the window is a beardless youth still in his late adolescence, carrying what appears to be a shepherd’s staff, and surrounded by grazing sheep in a lush meadow landscape. But surprisingly, and unlike most images of the Good Shepherd, the figure gently cradles in his arms not a lamb but a sleeping human infant. I had never before come across any depiction of the Good Shepherd represented with a baby, and was intrigued by the possible allegorical meaning of the slumbering child.

But then I noticed that the youth’s staff was not actually a shepherd’s crook but a flowering rod, a traditional symbolic attribute of St. Joseph. Yet he was not depicted as an old man, but as a beardless youth with long, flowing hair who appears to be in his late teens, with just the faintest shadow of a mustache on his upper lip. Moreover, the young man passes to the infant a pomegranate, said to contain 613 seeds, traditionally signifying the 613 commandments of the Torah and the transmission of the Jewish law through Joseph to Jesus.

For an artist so steeped in tradition to have accidentally included these very specific, highly idiosyncratic symbols seemed impossible. Then I realized that the title of the window might refer not to the youth who dominates the composition but to the little child asleep in his arms. The youth is St. Joseph, not Christ, and Jesus is the sleeping baby. The iconography and cast of characters had been misinterpreted by the parish for decades.

There are other depictions from art history of the Good Shepherd as a child, and in these paintings the Christ child usually has a shepherd’s crook and is surrounded by multiple sheep, as in several works by Murillo from the 17th century, with which La Farge would have been familiar.

Although showing Christ as a boy shepherd was not uncommon, I am not aware of any other representations of the Good Shepherd as an infant. Here La Farge, an otherwise quite conventional artist, seems to depart from tradition not only in the age of Christ but also in the tender years of his caretaker, St. Joseph.

The idea of Joseph as an old man has its earliest surviving expression in an early Christian writing, the Proto-Gospel of James or the Protoevangelium, a second-century text ascribed to James, the “brother of the Lord,” a character who figures prominently in the Book of Acts and has interchanges with Paul. The Church gets much of its lore about the lives of both Mary and Joseph from this apocryphal source (most scholars agree that Protoevangelium was not actually written by James). Although he is mentioned by name in both Matthew and Luke’s gospels, the New Testament never discusses Joseph’s age.

In the apocryphal book, Mary, while still a girl, is said to have worked in and lived near the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, weaving and embroidering vestments for the Jewish priests. However, as puberty approached, she married an elderly widower with children from his first marriage, whose wooden staff miraculously blossomed as a sign of his future role as foster father to Christ and chaste guardian of the Virgin.

This narrative explains James as the older stepbrother, not the natural brother, of Jesus and supports the claim that Mary was a virgin, not only during the conception and birth of Jesus but ever afterward as well. This version of the narrative is widely accepted by Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, as well as many Anglicans, and assumes that the marriage between Mary and Joseph was never consummated.

However, it was common among many Protestants, both in 1910 and today, to believe that while Mary was the Virgin Mother of Christ, after Jesus’ birth she had other children with Joseph, including James, making James the younger half-brother and not the older stepbrother of Jesus. St. Joseph shown as a young man, as he is in La Farge’s window, was more in line with this Protestant view of Joseph, even though the designer was a Roman Catholic throughout his life. But the parish was low church, so such an interpretation would have been acceptable, Ascension’s rector, the Rev. Elizabeth Maxwell, tells me.

The motif of the sleeping Christ child recalls the account of the angel appearing to Joseph in dreams, and his namesake from the Book of Genesis, who interpreted dreams. Dreams and sleeping have a special significance for both Josephs. Perhaps the sleeping infant as the Good Shepherd represents the slumbering Christ within each of us, who needs to be nurtured, cared for, and protected so that grace awakens and unexpectedly blossoms forth miraculously, like Joseph’s staff. Like him, we are all caretakers and shepherds entrusted with the guardianship of the divine child slumbering within.

The recent exhibition Saint Francis of Assisi, organized by the National Gallery in London, brought together painting, sculpture, and other media, including contemporary works, from various collections around the world that portrayed the life of this most popular of saints. It offered a rare opportunity to compare representations of Francis chronologically and cross-culturally through the eight centuries since his death.

Francis modeled a fully embodied approach to the spiritual life, by imitation of Christ’s poverty and suffering and ultimately by the physical marks of the stigmata on his body. Franciscans looked upon their founder’s scarred body as something like a sacrament, which led to an early interest in depicting the saint more realistically. Franciscan piety aimed at the heart, by showing the saints as people of their own times, fellow pilgrims of the spiritual life.

Francis conceived of the world not only as the site of temptation and corruption, but as a rich garden abounding in God’s grace. Some of his followers, like Bonaventure, later developed a complex understanding of the natural world as a place where divine mysteries are revealed. Similarly, the discovery and codification of the laws of perspective in the 15th century seemed to be a sign of the rational order underlying our perception of the world.

This combination of factors made Francis of Assisi perhaps the most widely depicted medieval person and contributed to a broader shift toward more representational art during the late Gothic and Renaissance periods in Italy, including an increasing sense of corporality. These developments will be traced here by briefly examining the evolution of figural style in depictions of the saint over the course of the three centuries between the death of the saint and the end of the Renaissance.

Among the earliest images of Francis in Italian art is a haunting painting by an anonymous artist from the late 13th century in the collection of the Vatican museums, which was not in the London exhibit (fig. 1). Executed in a style influenced by Byzantine icon painting, the figure of the saint, silhouetted against a gold background, is expressively distorted and highly abstracted; his enlarged eyes, long and slender nose, and small mouth resemble representations of Christ. This is not surprising because the saint was often referred to as the alter Christos and the “mirror” of Christ.

The folds in his garments fall in geometric patterns that seem almost independent of the body underneath; the knotted rope that girds him drops straight down as if against a flat surface. Even the book he holds is rendered in what almost seems to be reverse perspective. Francis is portrayed here as a disembodied, spiritualized being floating weightlessly in a spatially ambiguous, highly indeterminate field of gold. His feet never touch the ground. The saint appears to be not of this world.

A similarly disembodied compression of space can also be seen in a detail from the Bardi Saint Francis panel attributed to Coppo di Marcovoldo from around the same time (fig. 2). Here, the saint preaches before the sultan and his Islamic courtiers, who are represented as a field of same-size heads one above the other — even the sultan, enthroned on the right, as well as Francis and his companion on the left, are disembodied, schematic, and flat.

In stark contrast is the work of groundbreaking 14th-century painter Giotto di Bondone, in which Francis is shown with substantial weight and fully occupying illusionistic, three-dimensional space (fig. 3). The subject is a vision the saint experienced late in his life of a seraphic, winged, crucified Christ. It was during this vision that the saint is said to have received the stigmata, the bleeding wounds in his hands, feet, and side, the outward, physical sign of his mystical union with the body of Christ.

The weight and volume of his robust torso and limbs is evident in the strong modeling and consistent light source from the upper right, the saint’s garments falling in irregular folds that clearly reveal the masses of the body underneath. Moreover, the figure is shown in a landscape with a hermit’s hut and a small chapel, but these are not shown in proportion to the size of the saint, and the trees found here and there dotting the rocky landscape indicate a natural environment, yet the gold background betrays the flatness of the panel. It is as if the saint, asserting an almost sculptural solidity, inhabits the shallow space of a stage set or architectural niche. Despite having considerable gravitas, he casts no shadow.

In a composition inspired by Giotto from the early 15th century (fig. 4) by Stefano di Giovanni (known as Sassetta), the saint and his companion occupy a more realistic space informed by the use of linear perspective. A blue sky replaces the gold leaf background of the earlier painting, and the landscape, while still somewhat schematic, is much more believable, partly because the architecture is in proportion to the figures.

Yet despite its greater spatial plausibility, the artist has trouble positioning the winged figure in relationship to Saint Francis; the vision seems to be behind him in the sky like a cloud, even though the saint casts a shadow as if the vision were in front of him. This placement of the vision in space was not a problem for Giotto. Perspectival volume and three-dimensional spatial illusion increase naturalism but bring their own problems.

Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Francis in Ecstasy embodies both the Franciscan sense of poverty and its attitude toward nature, not only in the style and subject matter but also in its pristine, jewel-like oil glazing techniques (fig. 5). It was painted sometime in the last few decades of the 15th century, during the genesis of the High Renaissance in Italy.

It represents Francis alone at the mouth of his cave retreat. Having just stepped outside, he witnesses the early dawn as if it were an unexpected miracle. In the background we see the charming hilltop town of Assisi in central Italy from which he came. In Bellini’s version we do not witness the vision as in the earlier treatments. The saint’s hands bear the marks of the stigmata, but not yet his feet, as if the miracle were still in progress.

There is a nuanced coloristic dialogue between the warm amber underpainting and the cool gray-blue and brown transparent glazes he layers over this in articulating the main features of the landscape. But because cool colors typically seem to recede while warm colors appear to push forward, the muted yellow-orange underpainting almost gives the effect of the light coming from behind the picture, softly illumining the entire landscape and echoing the gentle light of the emergent dawn.

The attentiveness Bellini shows to every detail is typical of Netherlandish painting, but is somewhat rare in Italian art, in which the landscape setting is often minimal — just enough of a background to situate the figures in a believable space. Bellini’s landscape, however, is rendered in all its marvelous, minute, rich, naturalistic detail. And this truth to reality, with each leaf and blade of grass so lovingly rendered with all its imperfections, embodies the Franciscan reverence for nature that Bellini shares with the saint.

It was customary during the Italian Renaissance to idealize forms as a way of indicating the presence of divine grace. Images of Christ, his mother, and the saints would all resemble the idealized gods of the ancient Greco-Roman world, like Apollo and Aphrodite. Bellini’s St. Francis is a homely man of small stature, with a crooked nose and a balding pate, hardly the Adonis we might reasonably expect from an Italian master. But this lack of idealization is also in keeping with Franciscan humility. The modest saint as he is represented here is remarkably unbeautiful — not dominating the landscape but living harmoniously within nature’s bounty as brother and fellow creature.

In Bellini’s hands, not only the diminutive, homely saint, but also the animals, birds, plants, and even the sun  are radiant, and the “poor,” commonplace materials used in making the picture — wood, oil, pigments, varnish (but not gold) — are transformed sacramentally, so the painting becomes a sort of “incarnational” witness revealing the graced potential not only in Francis, but in all living things.

During the last decade of the 16th century, the young Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio (who would soon invent the Baroque style), painted his version of Francis receiving the stigmata (fig. 6). Here Francis is shown in a landscape at night swooning after his miraculous vision in the arms of a winged angel rendered on a disproportionately large scale, yet with a gentle, youthful, almost feminine face. In the background, barely visible, is the saint’s companion, who has built a small fire against the last rays of the setting sun.

We feel the full weight of the saint as he collapses and his eyes roll back in his head deliriously. His coarse garments accentuate his heaviness, and contrast with the angel’s sheer radiant clothing. All of it is spotlighted for us as if it were a scene from an opera. The artist substitutes his own face for that of the saint in this painting, indicating that not only Christ, not only Francis as the alter Christus, but also the artist and by implication all of us, are likewise called to partake in this mystical union with the incarnate body of Christ.

Yet it was arguably among the foremost aims of the artist to show exactly the opposite: how the ordinary contained a latent, mystical poeticism that transfigured an otherwise banal subject and placed it on or near the level of the classical work of the past at the very pinnacle of the Renaissance, as represented by the art of Raphael.

The painting depicts a flatboat laden with merchandise heading downstream on a hazy afternoon, while the riverboat’s workers enjoy a moment of recreation. The figures all seem natural and relaxed, yet if examined carefully, the posture of the young man ecstatically dancing on top of the crate in the center of the composition is almost identical to the posture of Christ in Raphael’s masterpiece, The Transfiguration.

The main figures in both compositions are contained within a nearly equilateral triangle. Christ’s hands are in the orans posture of a priest celebrating Mass, while the jolly boatman similarly gestures. His companions are not adoring prophets and disciples, but a fiddler whose face is hidden behind his straw hat and a pudgy, smiling boy marking the beat of the music with a tin pan while the others watch. The long-legged youth sitting on the right looking directly at the viewer is derived from a river god in another Raphael composition (the same figure would later be quoted by Manet in his Luncheon on the Grass).

The older boat pilot and his companion, with a broad-brimmed hat just visible between the dancer and the fiddler, steering the boat, have their counterparts in the figures at the left of the Transfiguration, who are just visible climbing the hill, and may represent the artist and the patron (and perhaps in the Bingham as well). The ship pilot’s red hat provocatively resembles the Phrygian cap, notorious symbol of the revolutions in France and throughout Europe, and Bingham was both fiercely democratic and a political activist.

Bingham’s family had moved to Missouri when he was a boy, and so the artist was familiar with life along the river, often depicting it in his genre scenes. The references to the Transfiguration are not merely formal or compositional, however, but imply that life on the Western frontier transforms people, and helps them realize their innate Christlike potential. The boatmen demonstrate their human nature in this everyday scene, just as Jesus revealed his divine nature on Mount Tabor. The gift of discernment demanded by the painting is the ability to see the latent Christ even in the most humble and coarse of subjects. Seeing the High Renaissance references in this lowly genre piece of daily life on the river required a similar act of recognition.

This transfiguring, “incarnational” process, it is implied, is made possible by the boatmen’s close communion with nature and in their shared repudiation of an overly refined society back east. Values such as democracy, freedom, equality, and independence are all fulfilled in this idealized representation of these young men’s carefree lives, their journey of life unrestricted by the fetters of conventional domesticity in a new, unspoiled Garden of Eden out west. Passionately involved with local politics, Bingham often celebrated frontier democracy in his work. The Jolly Flatboatmen is a populist, lowbrow realization of a highbrow Renaissance masterpiece whose artistic standing is above reproach, even by the snobs among the collectors who subscribed to the engravings.

The painting was commissioned by the American Art-Union, an organization that reproduced the work as a large black-and-white engraving and sold the reproductions to paying subscribers. A lottery among those who purchased these prints gave the original painting of The Jolly Flatboatmen to a grocer in upstate New York.

To fully appreciate the painting within its historical context, however, we must understand that the frontier West was not merely a geographical region in the 19th-century imagination. It was at least as much a myth: a cluster of ideas, hopes, fears, and fantasies about the far West, conceived of as an ever-expanding frontier of almost boundless proportions, a sublime and romantic horizon waiting to be explored, cultivated, and populated.

This construct is sometimes referred to as Manifest Destiny. Bingham’s work, as has been pointed out by several authors, embodies and exemplifies this myth almost uncritically. The concept of the frontier was gendered during the 19th century as a robust, masculine domain, while civilization, domesticity, family life, and conventional Protestant religiosity were all gendered as feminine and relegated to the margins.

From our perspective, the damage this myth has caused is obvious: the displacement and sometimes the extermination of the original inhabitants of the West, and the underlying racist assumptions; our reckless disregard for the consequences of our actions on the natural environment; and our sense of entitlement to the riches of creation in the name of commerce, yet without the responsibility to conserve it and be its stewards.

But we shouldn’t let these contemporary biases cloud our appreciation for Bingham’s achievement in this painting. Essentially a realist, he aspires to place mere genre painting (that is, paintings of everyday life) on the same level as the very highest category of painting in the 19th century, what was called “History Painting,” which generally had as its subjects biblical, mythological, or historical narratives, often on a grand scale. By elevating the ordinary, as Bingham has done in this painting, the artist transfigures it, and at the same time challenges viewers to discern the hidden image of the glorified Christ in their otherwise mundane, everyday reality.