the pantomathwar

At first glance, this looks like nothing more than a young Jesus stretching at the end of a long day in the carpenter’s shop. But look at the wall behind him… It was painted by the English artist William Holman Hunt, and it imagines him years before his ministry began, working with wood like any other young man in Nazareth. He has just put down his saw, and he lifts his arms above his head to stretch his tired body. It’s the most ordinary human gesture imaginable. But his shadow falls on the wall behind him, right across the wooden rack where the carpenter’s tools hang, and suddenly it takes the shape of a man with his arms nailed to a cross. On the floor, his mother Mary has been kneeling by an old chest, looking at the gifts the Magi gave her son when he was a baby. She turns, sees the shadow, and freezes... Once you notice the shadow, the rest of the room begins to speak too: a red headband lying at his feet foreshadows the crown of thorns, a star-shaped window above him recalls the star that once led the Magi to his cradle, and the arched window behind his head forms a halo. Hunt called the painting The Shadow of Death, and in one ordinary evening it holds a whole life: the gifts that welcomed his first breath, and the cross that would take his last...