The Death of the Firstborn

The Dutch-born, London-based orientalist painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema depicted the tenth plague of Egypt twice. A first treatment of the theme, The Sad Father, was created in 1859, but the canvas was later trimmed as apparently it didn’t satisfy the artist (Mason 2020: 220). The later version discussed here, painted one year after the première of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Aida and thus in the midst of an Ancient Egypt craze, repeats the ‘Pietà’ formula and some Egyptian decorative elements present in the earlier painting, but otherwise proposes a wholly novel mode of storytelling. 

Alma-Tadema frequently depicted Egyptian motifs and scenes, and his knowledge of that culture was vast, so that he could refer in his works to a ‘multitude of archaeological references’, many of which he encountered at the British Museum (Moser 2020: 197). Notable in this painting is the inclusion of a cartouche of Ramses II, connecting the scene to the specific Exodus episode it depicts, as that Pharaoh’s reign ‘was the period in which Moses … was placed by nineteenth-century scholars’ (Mason 2020: 221).

Beyond specific details, the painter seeks here to adopt the hieratic style of Egyptian art: the frontal, majestic, and massive central figures are passively, though nobly, contemplating the catastrophe as a fait accompli, rather than participating in any form of action. The living and the dead all share this static position, enhancing the impression that although only the firstborn were singled out for killing, the final plague meant the fall of an entire society. Any hint at dramatic commotion is relegated to the painting’s margins, where marginal characters are paradoxically allowed more agency: musicians, shaven-headed prostrate subjects—possibly priests—and, in the upper right-hand corner, Moses and Aaron themselves. The latter are not only the human vehicles of the disaster, but also, in the case of Moses, the ‘narrator’ who in Exodus 11 describes the coming plague and who here, as if proleptically, sees the consequences of his realized prophecy.  

References

Mason, Peter. 2020. The Modernists that Rome Made: Turner and Other Foreign Painters in Rome XVI–XIX Century (Rome: Gangemi Editore)

Moser, Stephanie. 2020. Painting Antiquity: Ancient Egypt in the Art of Lawrence Alma Tadema, Edward Poynter and Edwin Long (New York: Oxford University Press)

In the fourteenth-century Golden Haggadah, made in Barcelona, eight folia, each displaying four framed images, accompany the text. The depiction of the tenth plague of Egypt, the killing of the first-born sons, is among the most complex of these illuminations, as it includes three separate episodes.

The upper right image (the first in the sequence, corresponding to the right-to-left direction in which Hebrew is read) shows a man on his bed struck by the Angel of Death, with what may be a mourning relative in attendance. In the second scene (to the left), a woman grieves for her seemingly dead baby, accompanied by another person (the British Library description suggests an inversion of roles, claiming that what we see is ‘the queen mourn[ing] her baby lying lifeless on a nurse’s lap’). It has been noticed that this is a very female-centred recounting of the story, as the mourners in the upper register are all women. The lower register is occupied by what is probably a funeral procession for the victims (although other interpretations have been proposed for that scene).

Interestingly, the episode on the upper right-hand side is framed by an architectural setting, giving it a more specific, anecdotal character—though in no way a ‘historical’ reconstruction of anything Egyptian—compounded by the attempt to point to the very instant of the man’s expiration, with the Angel of Death represented in the action of hitting the victim. By contrast, the other two sections, representing the aftermath of the killings, are universalized through an abstract gold-leaf background.

This is particularly striking for the ‘Pietà’ scene at the upper left, which is thus readable as a conflation between the Virgin and Child theme and the depiction of Mary holding her dead, adult child in her lap. This iconography emerged, in the Christian context, precisely in the second quarter of the fourteenth century (first with the German Vesperbild, which raises the question of its early dissemination as far as Barcelona). However, for scholars such as Marc Michael Epstein (2011), The Golden Haggadah, while resembling contemporary Christian illuminations, is a profoundly Jewish work. Jewish, but not parochial: the grief of the Egyptians is represented here with great human sensitivity, in spite of their role as villains in the Exodus narrative.

References

Epstein, Marc Michael. 2011. The Medieval Haggadah: Art, Narrative, and Religious Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press)

While J.M.W. Turner is without doubt one of the most original and talented painters of the nineteenth century, it is arguably not from his ability as a storyteller that his fame derives.

His early work depicting the tenth plague of Egypt (there’s also a contemporary depiction of the fifth plague) is no exception, as the biblical narrative seems no more than a pretext for a dark, moody landscape. Dead children and grief-stricken mothers are depicted, and some blurry, distant groups of figures seem to engage in violence, but the complex demands of making an image of that specific story—one which both focuses on the death-event and its causes, and indicates that the victims are firstborn—are eluded.

Such reproach, for a painting included in the 1802 Royal Academy Exhibition to great critical acclaim, is perhaps not wholly deserved. A few scholars have noted Turner’s debt, in this work, to the French seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin (a departure from his more usual homage to Poussin’s contemporary Claude Lorrain—considered, like Turner, much more competent with nature than with humans). Poussin produced many landscapes in which a small-scale narrative scene is almost hidden but is, nevertheless, both the key for the work’s meaning and an echo of the subtleties of nature’s mood. In a similar vein, Ian Warrell describes Turner’s painting as a ‘pictorial essay’ which ‘employs a particularly ferocious type of sublime imagery as a visual metaphor for God’s deadly retribution against the first-born sons of the Egyptians’ (2013: 103).

Undeniably, what Turner lacks in specific, narrative content, he compensates for with great sensitivity in the nocturnal mood of this biblical scene. His painting is perhaps, thus, particularly apt as an interpretation of Exodus 11, where Moses describes, as a future event, the most terrible of the plagues, rather than to its actual taking place in the next chapter. More than a concrete occurrence, the killing of the firstborn is here a dark prophecy, the ultimate demonstration of the omnipotence of the God of the Hebrews, and the comparably miserable, insignificant existence of humans.

References

Warrell, Ian (ed.). 2013. J.M.W. Turner: The Making of a Master (London: Tate)