Dawn of Christianity (Flight into Egypt)

Dawn of Christianity (Flight into Egypt), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1841, is one of Turner's most explicitly symbolic late paintings, using the Nativity narrative of the Holy Family's flight to Egypt as a vehicle for a meditation on light as spiritual and divine substance. By the 1840s Turner's religious and mythological subjects had moved far from conventional biblical illustration toward a kind of luminous theological abstraction: the divine is present not in depicted figures but in the radiant light that floods the canvas from a blazing centre. The circular format of this and several companion works of the period emphasises the vortex-like centripetal energy of his late compositions, light radiating outward from a core of near-blinding intensity. Turner's relationship with religious subject matter was complex and personal — he was not a conventionally devout man, but he clearly believed that the representation of natural light was in some sense a sacred act. His colleague John Martin was producing vast biblical panoramas on monumental canvases at precisely this period; Turner's response was to dissolve the narrative into pure luminosity.

Turner renders the dawn scene with radiant luminosity, using concentric rings of light to suggest both the rising sun and divine illumination, dissolving the landscape into pure atmospheric brilliance.