Home > Themes

Themes

The themes underlying Virgil Burnett's illustrations evoke the eternal themes of medieval texts, such as love, lust, death, and immortality.  The themes link us to the larger timeline of humanity as Burnett reaches into the past to recover perennial motifs that outweigh the quotidian anxieties of the modern world.  The four major themes pictured here are: medievalism, eroticism, the artist as prophet, and the moral and physical decay of civilization.  Burnett, in his prophetic role as the artist, uses medieval themes to return us to the root of our humanity, e.g., our romantic, emotional impulses and fantasies.