At first glance, this looks like nothing more than two lovers holding each other against a garden wall. But look at what her hands are doing...
The painting is by John Everett Millais, and the scene is set in Paris, on a specific and terrible date: the 24th of August, 1572, the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when thousands of French Protestants, the Huguenots, were slaughtered in the streets by their Catholic countrymen.
On that night, there was only one way for a man to be spared: if he tied a white cloth around his arm, a sign that he was a Catholic, the killers would pass him by.
The man in this painting is a Huguenot. And the woman who loves him is desperately trying to save his life... she is winding a white band around his arm, gazing up at him, pleading with him to just wear it, to tell the small lie that will let him live and stay with her.
But gently, without anger, he is stopping her. With one hand he loosens the cloth she is tying. He will not wear it. To wear it would be to deny his faith, to save his body by betraying his soul, and he cannot do it, not even for her, not even to live.
Millais fills the scene signs of what is coming: she wears a ring, he wears none, a marriage that will never happen. And the two of them are pressed so close that you cannot tell, at a glance, whether this is an embrace or a struggle. It is both. It is a woman trying to hold a man in this world, and a man who has already made his peace with leaving it…
#witchhatatelier#richeunie
My favorite young couple! Made them a little older. They're probably going to a party, they're so dressed up❤️
I hope Euini's ears and tail will always be there🙏