Lazaria

Lowe’s inspiration for this powerful work of human drama was Henry Fuseli’s ‘Vision of the Lazar House’ (c.1794), a scene illustrating Milton’s Paradise Lost in which the Archangel Michael reveals to Adam the horrid future of humanity:
-Immediately a place
Before his eyes appear’d, sad, noysom, dark,
A lazar-house it seem’d, wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseas’d, all maladies. . .
. . . And over them triumphant Death his dart
Shook, but delay’d to strike, tho oft invok’t
With vows, as thir chief good, and final hope.
(Book XI,11.477-80, 491-493)
The central female figure, after Ingres’ ‘Roger Freeing Angelica’ (c.1859), can be interpreted as the physical personification of the Angel of Death, or Iris, messenger of the gods in Greek mythology.