The Pre-Raphaelites and the Apostate I Have Become—Spider-Woman (4)

(continued from “Really Living”)

The artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood are known for their lifelike portrayal of models rather than representations of ideal human beauty. John Everett Millais’s model for Ophelia was fellow artist Elizabeth Siddal and it is hard when looking at the painting not to see a woman who actually existed rather than the character from Hamlet.

 

This corporealness, this earthiness, this this-worldliness pervades even the holiest of subject matters. According to the exhibit text, this was scandalous to Victorian England. Gabriel Dante Rossetti’s Mary in Ecce Ancilla Domini is--with her flushed lips and placement in bed--erotic.

 

Which reminds me of writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev’s 2009-2010 Spider-Woman series. The covers had an eye-catching style, and as I read, I was struck by how lifelike Jessica Drew/Spider-Woman was. She looked like someone I had seen standing in line at Safeway, jogging by the waterside or reading in the park. Or at least like someone I might see doing those things.

 

 

It was no surprise then when I noticed the comics credited actress Jolynn Carpenter as Maleev’s model. She has stunning looks, but they are a real person’s looks--which is to say they are imperfect and unique--and the effect on a medium dominated by cookie-cutter features is an artistic statement. Emotionally, it makes the character more human and easier to identify with. Physically, it emphasizes the flesh of the real woman behind the image, which is both enticing and unsettling.

Using a model for a superhero may not appear to have much to do with religion, but the Victorians must have experienced an analogous frisson when seeing the Virgin Mary painted with such earthly candor as in Ecce Ancilla Domini. As with Maleev’s Spider-Woman, the Pre-Raphaelite painters idealized the real instead of denigrating the real as a poor copy of the ideal, and their art benefitted from it.

The women in the Pre-Raphaelites’ works occasionally have their eyes turned toward Heaven, but the painters themselves had their eyes fixed on earth and its inhabitants. I am not sure to what extent the Pre-Raphaelites were Christians, but I think the controversial turn in their work serves as a good indication of where we should focus our attention. Enough looking for the divine in the otherworld. Seek the numinous in this one.