MERRY CHRISTMAS, to those who celebrate it!

On this Christmas Eve Eve, it is my delight and pleasure to share with you The Ugliest Painting of Jesus, Mary and Joseph Ever Made.

"Uh, Spike, there is nothing wrong with that painting."

Rlytho? Weird, cuz you are currently beholding "Christ in the House of His Parents," AKA "The Carpenter’s Shop," by John Everett Millais. And I ASSURE you, Victorian London DUNKED ON THIS SO HARD I'm amazed it's STILL HERE.

And y'know what? That was EXACTLY what Millais wanted.

This painting is SHOCKING. It offends the sensibilities. Torn from the context of 1850, that might be hard to parse, but not to worry! Lemme walk you through it.

John Everett Millais- later SIR John Everett Millais- was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an artistic rebellion against what those involved considered the "corrupting influence" of "academic art." This is him.

Considered a painting prodigy, he won a place at the Royal Academy of Arts at age eleven, where he fell in with the wrong crowd, filthy roustabout art students William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (Here they are, having done one another's portraits.)

It's these three, along with four other folks, that would come to form the "inner circle" of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, although "brotherhood" is a helluva exaggeration.

I guess Pre-Raphaelite Guys Who Generally Agree With Each Other Philosophically didn't fly.

BUT ANYWAY.

Inspired by The Nazarene Movement in Germany, Pre-Raphaelites professed to desire a move away from "academic" approaches to art, which tended to stress formalized compositions, artificially posed and idealized subjects, and a general Classicism.

Remember, this was the 1840s, and the Industrial Revolution of Great Britain was WELL underway. Mills, steam engines, locomotives, and machine tools were TAKING OVER. The poor, pushed out my mechanization, were coming to cities in droves to work in new factories.

So naturally, the young guns of English art had to rebel against THAT, too.

Fewer Machines! More NATURE! And REAL nature, asshole; go out to the countryside and DRAW THE REAL FLOWERS THAT ARE ACTUALLY THERE. En plein air. Don't FAKE IT.

Cuz you know who FAKED IT?

ACADEMICS.

Like SIR SLOSH-UA, AKA Sir Joshua Reynolds, dead over a half-century by then and SQUARELY BLAMED by the Pre-Raphaelites for ruining English art with the founding of Royal Academy of Arts.

Yes, they really called him that for serious.

This, of course, was Not A Great Idea, Hella Rude. But FORTUNATELY, like a lot of sassy British artists, many of the Pre-Raphaelites didn't have to worry about making their work remotely desirable, and could focus on being total goddamn trolls.

Well-to-do families, y'know?

"Christ in the House of His Parents" (originally untitled) was debuted at the Royal Academy in 1850, accompanied by a Bible quote: :And one shall say unto him, What are those wounds in thine hands? Then he shall answer, Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends."

And before we go on, I just wanna share another painting, for the sake of contrast.

Revealed just two years later by French academic painter (and FIERCE defender of the academic approach) Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (AKA J.A.D. Ingres), we have "The Virgin Adoring the Host."

Smoove.

Glowing.

Composed.

Otherworldly.

She is indisputably better than you. She has never had a zit. She does not pee.

PERFECTION.

And here's Millais' Mary.

And I don't know much, but I can assure you:

This Mary pees.

And that is why EVERYONE HATED HER. And not just her, but this ENTIRE PAINTING.

In keeping with the Pre-Raphaelite ethos, Millais went to great lengths to emphasize realism and authenticity.

The shop was based on a real carpenter's shop, found in Oxford Street. The people were painted from life, and NOT professional models; they were family and friends. Joseph, for example, has Millais' father's head, and the work-toughened arms of an actual carpenter.

And the sheep in the background, meant to represent the future Christian flock- my person favorite part, because holy shit that SILENT, STARING HORDE- were painted from heads purchased from the butcher.

For all its confrontational contrarianism, execution-wise, the image itself is actually pretty standard religious stuff. The child Christ has cut himself on a protruding nail while helping his father. The blood on his palm drips onto a foot, mimicking his future stigmata.

His mother, Mary, instead of comforting him, is actually the one BEING comforted, kneeling beside him and presenting her cheek for Christ to kiss.

This doesn't bother him, after all. Mortal pain is nothing to him. He'll suffer for everybody, soon enough.

Behind the pair, Christ's grandmother Anne pulls out the offending nail (and aren't her hands great? Swollen and red with arthritis). Off to the side, a little boy, clearly John the Baptist (and identified as such by his fur loincloth), approaches with water to wash the wound.

This, naturally, also echoes his own future role as Christ's baptizer.

In the background, a dove rests on a ladder, a metaphor for Jacob's Ladder.

The Holy Spirit has descended from heaven to witness this.

The carpenter's triangle beside it echoes the Holy Trinity.

And off to the left, a figure representing Jesus' future apostles watches it all.

So really, seriously, content-wise? This painting makes no serious waves. It was all there; the symbolism, the main players, the attitudes.

But y'all.. no halos. No god rays. No PERFECTION.

And OH GOD.

Some published criticism of "Christ in the House of His Parents."

The "Times" critic called it "revolting" for its depiction the Holy Family as normal people, "with no conceivable omission of misery, of dirt, of even disease, all finished with the same loathsome minuteness."

"This display of anatomical knowledge and studious vulgarity of portraying the youthful Savior as a red-headed Jew boy, and the sublime personage of the virgin a sore-heeled, ugly, every-day sempstress, will in no way tend to the "consummation so devoutly to be wished." -Builder

And, finally, the granddaddy dunk of them all, from "Household Words":

"In the 15 century, a certain feeble lamp of art arose in the Italian town of Urbino. This poor light, Raphael Sanzio by name, better known... as Raphael... was fed with a preposterous idea of Beauty...

..with a ridiculous power of etherealising, and exalting to the Very Heaven of Heavens, what was most sublime and lovely in the expression of the human face divine on Earth with the truly contemptible conceit of finding in poor humanity the fallen likeness of the angels of GOD...

...as raising it up again to their pure spiritual condition. This very fantastic whim effected a low revolution in Art, in this wise, that Beauty came to be regarded as one of its indispensable elements. In this very poor delusion, Artists have continued until the present...

...when it was reserved for some bold aspirants to "put it down."

And it goes ON. This dude GOES IN.

"The Pre-Raphael Brotherhood, Ladies and Gentlemen, is the dread Tribunal which is to set this matter right... on the wall of the Royal Academy... you shall see what this new Holy Brotherhood, this terrible Police that is to disperse all Post-Raphael offenders, has "been & done!"

Can you guess who wrote this? And a WHOLE LOT MORE?

Why, it's another Christmas fixture. Ol' Charlie Dickens.

And woof, he did NOT care for this nonsense.

"In the foreground of that carpenter’s shop is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown, who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter."

uuuuh wow okay

"And to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster."

Damn dude.

"Wherever it is possible to express ugliness of feature, limb or attitude, you have it expressed. Such men as the carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty drunkards, in a high state of varicose veins, are received. Their very toes have walked out of St. Giles’s."

I have had to trim SO MUCH of Dickens' review for Twitter, but it's ALL LIKE THAT.

HE HATES THIS.

EVERYONE HATES THIS.

It is THE WORST GODDAMN THING they have EVER SEEN.

And again?

That was the point.

"Christ in the House of His Parents" became a SCANDALOUS SENSATION. it ignited a public debate about the merits of realism, spearheaded by respected critic John Ruskin (DESPITE him publicly saying he hated the painting.) QUEEN VICTORIA had it brought to the palace for viewing!

By the standards of the P.R.B., it was an absolute success. An attention-grabber that splashed out over every major news source, intruded on the conversations of those who didn't typically discuss art day-to-day, and challenged what the public was willing to consider art.

*clears throat loudly*

But anyway. :V

But it turns out, the success (and criticism) of "Christ in the House of His Parents" was, in a lot of ways, the final hurrah for the PRB proper: It had basically dissolved by 1853.

Out of all the central PRB figures, it was Millais who stuck to his guns of Demanding Authenticity and Realism in longest, obsession over the details of sheep, uniforms, and genuinely waterlogged women to produce some other memorable work.

But as his, ahem, own family grew in size, and his requirements to play breadwinner intensified? His work took on a slightly more... palatable note.

Ruskin referred to this change in his art as "a catastrophe."

And Millais ended his career the way many young rebels do: a member of the establishment. Knighted, just like "Sir Slosh-ua," wealthy and comfortable, a member of the Royal Academy of Arts... and talking a MILE OF SHIT about the young artist upstarts of 1890s Britain.

My personal favorite of his is a lost work, "Time, the Reaper," completed a year before he died.

Weirdly enough, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is now associated NOT with inflexible demands for authentic realism, but dreamy portraits of pouty dames with perfect hair, afloat in vague Elysian set dressing.

Blame Dante Gabriel Rossetti for that.

Turns out, pretty girls staring into the middle distance are pretty good for paying for the groceries.

And your drug habit.

And for numbing the witheringly bad reception of your not-at-all-intended-to-be-terrible first book of poetry.

:V

But these are ENTIRELY different stories, for another time.

Merry Christmas, everyone! Nobody got a halo, this year. Too bad.

But hey, speaking of challenging modern takes on Biblical stories, now would be a GREAT time to pre-order @evandahm's "The Harrowing of Hell!" I'm publishing it this spring! https://www.amazon.com/dp/1945820446/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_FAAaEbGMS9TCZ

Seriously, it's great.