Saint George Hare – Victory of Faith (1889)

I missed the hungry lions lurking behind bars in the heavily shadowed upper left corner when I first saw this–as such my thought was Victory of Faith is a weird title for a painting that is ostensibly about lesbians, isn’t it?

As I’m looking into it now, I’m realizing my mistake and that it’s both a mistake and an insight into the work.

My instinct–that this is a work of erotica–is almost certainly true. Hare’s other work was rife with similar sorts of tableaux. However, the lions I missed initially are rather important.

This scene is ostensibly a depiction of a high society misstress and her maid who are discovered to have converted to Xtianity and sentenced to death by lions in the coliseum. They have been stripped and locked in the anteroom of the coliseum where the lions that are to eat them look on as they slumber.

As has been fairly well-established sex was a fixation within Victorian culture, even if no one really addressed it directly. There was apparently a tradition of coding erotica into work that seemed explicitly Xtian at first glance. The choice of martyrs as subjects would’ve been practically–many saints were tortured and otherwise humiliated/punished, thus them being clothed would been a vestige of protection. (See also: Saint Eulalia)

Additionally, apparently Xtian commentators saw the lack of clothing as proof of their freedom from sin.

Interestingly, I can’t help thinking of this image in terms of the trope of Daniel in the Lions’ Den–where Daniel is depicted as standing upright and prayerful through the night. It reminds me of the tired police procedural trope–which is factually dubiou–where the guilty are so relieved at having finally been found out that they sleep like babies; whereas the innocent are so consumed by their righteous fury at being falsely accused, that they cannot sleep.

Daniel was innocent and stood vigilant through the night; these women are guilty (of being Xtians) and therefore slumber.

The ways in which this is both Xtian allegory and work of Victorian erotic all at once are intriguing. Unfortunately, there’s also apparently racial connotations–namely: the painting can be read to contain only one woman, i.e. the dark skinned woman who in her martyrdom is purified and becomes white.

I think it’s a dubious claim and given that their are two lions, I just don’t see it. However, there was apparently a moral panic in the ‘woke’ Victorian world where slavery was considered to be morally repugnant but instead of working to right centuries of wrong headed thinking, injustice and inequality–a new focus centered on ‘white slavery’ (which apparently was entirely preoccupied with sex work, it seems–something I did not know until just now).

With this painting, Hare was apparently making very thinly veiled erotica designed to fool Xtians but to also give voice to his own interest in a sort of slave spectacle peddled by the likes of Boucicault.

The Victory of Faith is also the title of one of Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films so again, I suspect there’s more unpleasantness to this painting than I’m even able to scratch the surface on.