Faithful Unto Death — Edward John Poynter
Fortitude and stoicism in the face of a fateful destiny.
Among the many dimensions of meaning that painting has (almost infinite, we could say), one of the most interesting is its capacity to be a chronicle and, at the same time, a tribute to the history of civilization itself.
The narrative of these works must always be examined with a magnifying glass since, on many occasions, it is a compendium of several factors: the historical moment in which the work is created, the thematic object of the work, and the very nature of the artist, among many other variables that force us to carry out a rigorous analysis.
The case of Faithful Unto Death, a work painted by Edward John Poynter during the second half of the 19th century, is also an indirect chronicle of one of the great archaeological milestones of that century: the discovery of the Roman city of Pompeii, preserved in part thanks to the ash that fell from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
That eruption took place in 79 A.D. and was terrifying. According to scientific studies, in a matter of minutes, the city was razed to the ground and buried under tons of ash.
However, every cloud has a silver lining; the violent and ferocious nature of the eruption allowed precious testimonies from…
