Tripping the light fantastic

Rowena Loverance reviews ‘Light Show’ at London’s Hayward Gallery

by Rowena Loverance 15th March 2013

‘Light’, wrote Robert Grosseteste in the thirteenth century, ‘is more exalted and of a nobler and more excellent essence than all corporeal things.’ From the ancient to the early modern world, it was a commonplace that light offered the best way of representing the unrepresentable, namely God. As recently as the beginning of the twentieth century, Holman Hunt’s Light of the World drew vast crowds on a world tour – seen, according to one estimate, by four-fifths of the population of Australia.