This chapter argues that visual art played a generative role in the compositional processes of Vaughan Williams. His taste in painting was influenced by the art historians Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, who lauded the formal simplicity of works by fifteenth-century Italian artists like Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, and Andrea Mantegna. The hymn tune ‘Mantegna’ was conceived as a ‘musical representation’ of that artist’s Agony in the Garden (c.1455–6, National Gallery, London). Reproductions of fifteenth-century paintings were displayed in the composer’s home, The White Gates, Dorking, from 1929.

English modernist painting developed rapidly after 1910. Among contemporary artists, Vaughan Williams particularly admired the work of the brothers Paul and John Nash. Their work has been described as ‘Neo-Romantic’, returning to the traditions of British landscape painting but with a modernist inflection. Vaughan Williams engaged directly with the visual legacies of the Romantic era in Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930), a musical response to William Blake’s Illustrations of the Book of Job (1826). Blake’s images were vividly translated into sets and costumes by wood engraver Gwendolen Raverat. The production represented a masterly fusion of visual and musical elements.

Both in painting and in film, Christian symbols, especially allusion to the Passion with an emphasis on its ambiguous status of the body, occurs frequently. This chapter examines paintings about dying that show up in films, in what is called intermediality. What the author gleans from Jasper’s work is an attempt to overcome binary oppositions and the separations they entail. The bridge is the imagination, which compels us to take fiction seriously as a knowledge-producing field. If we take Coleridge’s definition of fiction, “the willing suspension of disbelief”, we can see that the three main words help us to be serious about guilt and responsibility, but also about liberation, the latter through the release of fantasy. It is this view of fiction that makes it possible to overcome the dichotomies that rule the world, including the one between sacred and profane. This dichotomy is explored in works of visual art about the body, and especially the dying body, by Velázquez, Grünewald, Mantegna, Zvjagintsev’s film The Return, and the film/video project Madame B by Bal and Williams Gamaker.