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(piano music playing)
Steven: We're in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston
and we're looking at a lovely Burne-Jones' that's called Hope.
It's an allegory in the Renaissance tradition.
So often in Renaissance paintings, you see images
that are personifications of virtues,
but it's so interesting to see one
at the very end of the 19th century.
Beth: And we know that Burne-Jones really admired
Renaissance art and had made a trip to Italy
and was enthusiastic about all the great Renaissance
artists, including Michelangelo and Botticelli and Gitotto.
Steven: I really see Botticelli here
and so it makes sense to me that this is a
pose that would have been inspired by what he saw in Italy.
Beth: And there's an interesting story behind this commission.
Burne-Jones was asked by the patron
to paint a dancing figure and when William Morris died,
who was a very close friend and Burne-Jones wrote to
the patron and asked if instead of doing a dancing figure,
he could instead go back to an earlier watercolor
that he had done of a figure of Hope and redo it in oil
and that's what we're looking at here.
Steven: So in some ways, this is a really personal image
and when you know that story, it feels the lyricism
of this painting, the kind of emotional power.
So we have this beautiful, graceful figure, in some ways,
she's still dancing, but you'll notice that she's changed.
She's shackled. We know the situation is serious
because that shackle around her ankle
is placed just over some small flowers,
which are periwinkle, which in antiquity
was used to crown people who had been
condemned to death.
Beth: And so it's hard to feel hopeful,
but I suppose that's the point of hope, is that
one struggles to feel it against all odds
and so the way that she's chained to the earth
and yet reaches up toward the sky,
but seems to successfully pull the sky down toward her.
It's a really lovely metaphor for exactly the way that hope feels.
Steven: Those words are really nice metaphor
for the way in which the painting is actually structured.
The painting is lyrical but it's full of specificity,
the kind of specificity that we associate
with the Pre-Raphaelites in general.
Look, for instance, at the apple blossoms that she
holds in her arm, a traditional symbol of hope.
But there's a real specificity in the rendering
of those apples and yet at the same time,
the painting also allows for this completely
dream-like idea of pulling the sky down
and so you have the technical precision,
but it also then, this pure fantasy.
Beth: So in a way, she is really both earthbound
and also transcendent as a figure of hope.
Steven: The painting is wonderful also in that the
artist takes advantage of the opportunity to
metaphorically speak to the subject at hand,
this notion of hope and the notion of bondage
and I think one of the most beautiful examples of that
is in her hair, which is both free and beautiful but also tied.
Look at the way that it wraps around her neck
and so it becomes a noose, but it's beautiful
and it's loose and it could unbundle itself.
Beth: It's interesting that Burne-Jones is
[annoyed] through this painting,
memorializing his relationship with his good friend,
William Morris and so we can interpret Hope there for as
hope for an afterlife, hope for meeting in heaven.
It's interesting to me that Burne-Jones as a modern man
in the modern industrial world,
he's not representing Christ's resurrected from the tomb,
but instead this allegorical figure that works
in a modern world to speak of hope in all of its forms.
Steven: And I find its format interesting.
It's very tall and thin, as if it might be a panel
in a stained glass window, but there's something almost
gothic about its proportions.
I also find it interesting that the museum displays it
without glass and it recalls a letter that Burne-Jones
wrote about this painting and about the patrons
of this painting saying that they were not displaying it
behind glass because of the bad reflections that it caused,
but Burne-Jones was disappointed.
He loved his paintings to be behind glass
and thought it gave it a kind of a ethereal glazing
as he called it and it speaks to his visual sensitivity.
Beth: The composition is interesting,
the very shallow space that the figure stands in
so that she seems entrapped in this very tiny niche,
the bars of the window behind her that entrap her,
the lyricism of her body, those lovely curves
formed by her hand moving down to her wrist,
out to her elbow, back to her shoulder,
across her other shoulder, this kind of curving lovely
figure, based on figures from Botticelli, that's in such
contrast to that grid behind her.
Steven: Well, that's exactly it.
All that is organic in the human body
against all that is hard and cold in the architecture
of the space that we create.
Beth: And so maybe this is really a painting about
contrasts, hope both being earthbound
but turning toward heaven,
the hard grid formed by the bars against the
sinuousness of her body,
the specificity of the earthly against the classical idealism.
This is a painting that really unites opposites.
(piano music playing)