The Work
William Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat (1856), now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, is the most theologically programmatic of all Pre-Raphaelite paintings - a work painted on the literal shores of the Dead Sea during Hunt's first Palestine expedition as an explicit statement of substitutionary atonement theology. The white goat collapsing in exhaustion on the salt flats of the desolate shoreline, a red ribbon around its horns, is depicted with the Pre-Raphaelite movement's characteristic combination of naturalistic precision and typological intention.
Biblical Source
Leviticus 16:21-22 - Aaron "shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites - all their sins - and put them on the goat's head. He shall send the goat away into the wilderness in the care of someone appointed for the task. The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a remote place" - describes the Day of Atonement scapegoat ritual. This is the azazel goat (distinct from the goat sacrificed for Yahweh): the animal on which Israel's collective sin is symbolically transferred and which is then sent into the wilderness to die, carrying the sins away.
Isaiah 53:6 - "We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all" - and John 1:29 - "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" - are the New Testament texts that the Church Fathers read as connecting the scapegoat ritual to Christ's atonement. Hunt painted the picture as an explicit statement of substitutionary atonement: the goat bearing the sins of Israel is a type of Christ bearing the sins of the world.
Artist
William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) was the most theologically serious of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the only one for whom religious painting was a genuine expression of faith rather than a stylistic choice or a commercial category. He made multiple journeys to Palestine to paint biblical scenes with archaeological accuracy, believing that authentic visual witness to the biblical world would strengthen Christian faith. The Scapegoat was the product of six weeks of painting at the shore of the Dead Sea - a location Hunt chose for its desolation and its proximity to the Qumran region where the scapegoat ritual may have been enacted.
Iconography
The goat's posture - front legs buckling, head inclined - is simultaneously the posture of an exhausted animal and an iconographic allusion to the Ecce Homo tradition (Christ presented to the crowd) and the Imago Pietatis (Christ as the man of sorrows). The red ribbon around the horns is the fil of crimson that Jewish tradition associated with the scapegoat ritual; some traditions held that it turned white when the atonement was accepted, drawing on Isaiah 1:18. The desolation of the salt flats of the Dead Sea - barren, white, utterly inhospitable - is the visual correlative of the place to which sin is sent. The painting was exhibited with an epigraph combining Isaiah 53:4 and Leviticus 16:22.