On the day after the anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, the chosen picture is Daniel Maclise’s panoramic Death of Nelson. The work was painted in the early 1860s following a commission to decorate the brand-new Houses of Parliament (the old ones, as readers of last Sunday’s column will know, having burned down in 1834). Few subjects could have been better calculated to stir patriotic pride. Even half a century after his death most British people felt profoundly indebted to Admiral Horatio Nelson. Had it not been for his fleet’s famous victory over the numerically superior French and Spanish forces at Trafalgar on October 21, 1805, Britannia could never have ruled the waves; and Britons might well have been slaves.

Nelson’s contemporaries saw him as a secular Christ, a sacrificial hero who had died to save his people from the yoke of Napoleonic conquest. Maclise placed his pale and stricken hero at the centre of the scene of battle, surrounding him with the grieving figures of his fellow officers and men. This group recalls traditional depictions of the Lamentation over the dead Christ. The ship’s first lieutenant, Thomas Hardy, a seadog version of the Madonna, cradles Nelson in his arms with maternal tenderness. In the background, where battle rages, shattered masts faintly recall the crosses of the Crucifixion: another subliminal suggestion that the scene of the battle is also a sort of Golgotha. Small wonder that the reviewer for the Art Journal of 1866 interpreted the picture as half battle painting, half altarpiece, and thought he saw the promise of transcendence in the little window of blue sky above Nelson’s head: “The blanket of thick smoke is rolled away, the gates of the future, into which so many spirits are flying from their mortal tenements, are thrown open, and...

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