Blind Leading the Blind

The title is a quotation. In Matthew's Gospel Christ says of the Pharisees that when a blind man leads a blind man, both fall into the ditch, and painters had been taking that line literally for centuries before Ralli got to it. Bruegel's version of 1568 is the famous one, a row of six beggars going down one after another. Ralli painted his in 1881, and he does something much smaller with the same words. The Greek title on the museum's record keeps the Gospel phrase in the singular, one blind man leading one other, with no crowd and no moral apparatus built around them. At 57 by 39 centimetres it is one of his larger canvases in Athens. It came to the National Gallery from Antonios Benakis, the Alexandria born collector who later gave the city his family house and his collections and so founded the Benaki Museum, about a kilometre from where this one hangs.