Is the sadness reflected in King Solomon’s face a sign of despair? Does he know that the Temple he cradles in his arms will be destroyed in time? Does he fear he will be the cause of its ruin?
When the Temple is finally built, the Lord appears before Solomon, to both praise and warn him: “I have consecrated this house you have built and put my name there forever; my eyes and my heart will be there for all time…But if you turn aside from following me, you or your children,…I will cut Israel off from the land that I have given them; and the house that I have consecrated for my name I will cast out of my sight; and Israel will become a proverb and a taunt among all peoples. This house will become a heap of ruins” (1 Kings 9:3, 6, 7).
Perhaps, however, Solomon is despondent for more sentimental reasons: He has at last fulfilled his father’s promise to build a Temple in Jerusalem. But David did not live to see the building completed.
Sir Edward Burne-Jones had been designing stained glass windows for three decades when in 1890 he produced “King Solomon Holding the Temple,” now in Leigh, Staffordshire, in central England. He and his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti (whose work appears on the cover of this issue) were members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an informal grouping of British artists who hoped to recapture the simple spirituality of art created in the days before Raphael.
Is the sadness reflected in King Solomon’s face a sign of despair? Does he know that the Temple he cradles in his arms will be destroyed in time? Does he fear he will be the cause of its ruin?
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