Let There be Light

The first in a series of biblical illustrations by John Martin, this print presents us with the dawn of creation. The artist adapted the design from a similar composition in his illustrations to John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1825). Milton’s poem (1667) contains a narrative of Creation in six days that follows the account in Genesis.

In his earlier design, Martin had focused on the deity placing the lights in the heavens on the fourth day (Book 7, Line 339)—the sun, the moon, and the stars. In this later image, the inscription cites Genesis 1:2–3 and so refers to the creation of light itself on the first day. Nevertheless, the work encapsulates all of the first four days of Creation: light, firmament, dry land, and lights in the heavens are depicted together here. Martin may simply have wanted to depict several aspects of God’s work of Creation, but his decision to depict several episodes simultaneously might also reflect the difficulty of depicting the first appearance of light as a stand-alone subject.   

As in his Paradise Lost design, Martin depicts the deity placing the sun in the sky. However, here, the figure is less distinct. Martin was probably responding to contemporary critics who were outraged by the prominent figure of the deity in the earlier design.

The sun and moon are also more diffuse in this later image, perhaps in recognition of the fact that their creation is not properly accomplished until the fourth day. The light does not all emanate from the sun, as we would normally expect. As a contemporary critic noted, we also seem to see ‘light, for the first time, … shed[ding] its genial influence on the cold dark matter of the chaotic world’ (Anon. 1831: 253) prior to the heavenly bodies becoming light’s specific source.

Martin has depicted the world before living things. It is light alone that has vitality in this opening scene of his series.

References

Anon. 1831. ‘New Publications’, The Athenaeum, 181

On 14 November 1940, Coventry Cathedral was destroyed in one of the most devastating bombing raids of the Second World War.

A new cathedral was built adjacent to the ruins of the old church between 1956 and 1962. From the earliest stages of the project the architect, Basil Spence, worked collaboratively with other artists. Spence commissioned John Piper to design the windows of the Baptistery, which Piper realized in partnership with glassmaker Patrick Reyntiens.

The curved window contains 198 lights that, together with the stonework, form a grid. The coloured glass is schematically arranged so as to emit a large blaze of light when illuminated, with lights of green, red, and blue surrounding the yellow lights at the centre of the window.

Piper stated that the blaze of light symbolizes the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of God hovered over the face of the water at Creation, just as it descended upon Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan. Here, it is evoked in the light of the window above the cathedral’s place of baptism—a powerful backdrop for the performance of the sacrament.

The blast of light of the window can also be seen as representing the light of Christianity, or the original light of Creation. We can imagine not just the Spirit hovering over the waters, but also the light that God first summoned into being.

There is a long tradition of association between baptism and Creation. In baptism, an individual becomes a member of the church community, and so baptism is itself a moment of new creation. It is a death followed by a rebirth; a transfer from the power of darkness to the power of light. The Baptistery window speaks to the new creation of the individuals who are baptized before it, and of Coventry Cathedral’s rebirth after the war.

As Frances Spalding has noted, when the light is right, the colours of the window are cast on to the Baptistery, making that light a participant in the liturgy of rebirth and recreation that takes place there (2009: 379).

References

Spalding, Frances. 2009. John Piper. Myfanwy Piper. Lives in Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

What might light without a source look like? That scientific impossibility is the subject of this woodcut by Paul Nash.

The print is the third in a series of twelve designs by Nash relating to the Creation narrative in Genesis 1. Each image is accompanied by the text of the relevant verse(s) of Scripture, and has a title based on the subject. The Division of Light from Darkness is accompanied by the three verses that are explored here (1:3–5).

The work depicts multiple shafts of light emerging from the darkness. The division is marked in the delineation between very dark portions of the image to the right and top left, and sections that are dominated by shafts of light to the left and at top centre.

The roughly horizontal beams of light that predominate at the lower left echo the ripples in the waters in the preceding plate, The Face of the Waters (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2001.45.1.2). The suggestion, perhaps, is that these shafts of light are travelling across the surface of the water.

But other rays of light travel upwards, seeming to emerge from the upward-facing surface of the dark, angular form at the upper right of the image. This dark shape also seems to reflect some of the horizontal lines, perhaps suggesting that it is another mass of water.

Throughout the composition, the light beams vary in length, intensity and direction. There is no single point of origin for the rays of light, nor a pattern to how they behave. This chaos reflects the fact that the ‘lights in the firmament’ (KJV)—the sun, moon and stars—are not created until verse 15, so the light seen here is without physical source.

This inaugural moment of Creation manifests God’s unbounded creativity, which is not limited by the world’s laws of causation. The strangeness of the play of light in Nash’s design encourages us to reflect on the Creation account in Genesis 1 as an expression of the seemingly impossible becoming the very foundation of reality.