站立在阳光中的天使

Turner was 71 when he showed this in 1846, and the critics had run out of patience. One reviewer complained there was no controlling hand to restrain such aberrations. What they were looking at was an angel from the Book of Revelation, sword raised, standing inside the sun in a whirl of blinding light, with small biblical figures cowering below. Turner pinned verses from Revelation to it, about birds gathered to feast on the slain. By this point in his life he was dissolving almost everything solid into pure light, and here he pushed it about as far as it would go, a picture that is mostly radiance with the story barely holding together inside it. He had five years left.