The Triumph of the Innocents

Hunt’s painting is the first of three versions of this unusual subject, which has its origins in the biblical narrative of the Flight into Egypt. When the final painting was exhibited, the artist provided an explanatory pamphlet. King Herod, threatened by the newborn “King of the Jews,” ordered the slaughter of all male infants in Bethlehem. Here the fleeing Holy Family is enveloped by “the embodied spirits of the martyred Innocents.” The infant directly below the Christ child displays his torn garment, a prefiguration of the wound in Christ’s side at the Crucifixion. “Airy globes” display Jewish dreams of the union of heaven and earth at the advent of the Messiah. In the largest bubble one can make out the sleeping figure of a patriarch with a “ladder or pathway up and down, which is traversed by the servants of God.”