William Holman Hunt's The Shadow of Death (1870-1873, Manchester Art Gallery) is the most typologically ambitious painting of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and one of the most theologically inventive works in the entire history of Victorian art. It depicts Jesus as a young adult carpenter in his Nazareth workshop, stretching his arms after a long day's work - and in that simple physical gesture, casting on the workshop wall behind him the precise shadow of a man crucified on a cross.
The painting's central device - the shadow as prefiguration - is rooted in the Hebrew Bible's typological tradition, in which events of the Old Testament are understood as shadows of events in the New (Colossians 2:17: 'These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ'). But Hunt's application of this principle goes further: the shadow is not a symbol or an allusion but a visual argument about the nature of the Incarnation itself. The word became flesh, and it became this particular flesh: the flesh of a Galilean carpenter, who grew up in a particular workshop in a particular village, and who was - from before the foundation of the world (Revelation 13:8) - the Lamb of God who would be sacrificed. The stretched arms of the morning stretch in the carpenter's workshop prefigure the extended arms of the crucifixion. The ordinary labor of human life is always already the preparation for the divine sacrifice.
Hunt derived this meditation from Isaiah 53:3 - 'He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain' - and from John 1:29: 'Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!' The carpenter of Nazareth is continuously the Lamb of Calvary, and every moment of the thirty hidden years is continuous with the three public years that culminated in the cross.
Mary's role in the painting is devastatingly poignant. She kneels in the foreground before an ornamental chest containing the gifts of the Magi - the myrrh that was brought to the birth and would be used again at the burial. She has looked up from her work and seen the shadow on the wall, and her face shows the horrified recognition of a mother who has always known, and periodically cannot bear knowing, what her son was born for.
Hunt spent nearly three years in Palestine between 1869 and 1872, accumulating the archaeological and ethnographic details that go into every surface of the painting: the authentic Galilean village architecture, the carpenter's tools of the period, the clothing of a Nazareth workman, the light quality of a Palestinian workshop. The Pre-Raphaelite conviction that sacred truth required historical precision made the painting both a devotional work and an exercise in archaeological reconstruction.
The painting was purchased by the Manchester Art Gallery upon its exhibition in 1873, and Hunt's extensive promotional tour of the work through Britain and America - an evangelistic undertaking as much as a commercial one - made it one of the most widely discussed religious images of the decade.