Recently I've been thinking about story-telling in the last two chapters of John's Gospel, which strips out the 'cast' that populates the stories of Jesus' resurrection in the synoptic gospels to tell the story from the perspective of individual encounters between Mary Magdalene, John, Thomas and Peter, and the absent/present figure of Jesus. Some paintings of some of these episodes help.
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Lavinia Fontana, Christ appears to Mary Magdalene c.1581 |
Fontana's painting gives us Mary's encounter from her perspective. Mary arrives at the tomb to find the body of Jesus missing: 'she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. He asked her,
“Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.”' (John 20:14-15) In the narrative, Jesus is not dressed as a gardener, only mistaken for one; the painting takes us into Mary's world-view and her split-second moment of mis-identification.
In John's resurrection narrative Thomas is absent when Jesus' other disciples
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Caravaggio, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas c. 1601-1602 |
see him, refusing to believe their story: "“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” A week later, Jesus appears again, inviting Thomas: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.” (John 20:25,27). Caravaggio's picture shows this curiosity pushed to its limits. As with Fontana's picture, so with Caravaggio, the artist imagines his way beyond the details of the story. There is no indication that Thomas took Jesus up on his offer but it's clear that it's Thomas' searching doubt which becomes the focus of the picture, clear from the intensity of the gaze of the three disciples and the glow of the painting's light upon their curious faces. Only Jesus remains fully in shadow: is he the least known? The least knowable? Whilst his hands accept Thomas' investigation perhaps the shadow across his face implies that in the narrative of the painting, Jesus cannot be known by this investigation. A visual depiction perhaps of Jesus' subsequent words to Thomas: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
Following Jesus' encounters with Mary, and Thomas, the story continues with Jesus appearing to Peter and six other disciples, who are out on a fishing trip on Galilee. Duccio's painting is itself a commentary on different ways of story-telling through painting. The 'realistic' expressions on the faces of the disciples in a
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Duccio, Christ’s appearance on Lake Tiberias 1308-11 (Maesta Altarpiece) |
painting whose composition is so stylised betray a shift away from an earlier style of painting which followed conventions about the portrayal of sacred things to allow pictures to act as 'signs' (icons) - directing their viewers towards sacred things. For me this is a shift towards painting the sacred in terms of the everyday of the painter. Just as Fontana gives us Mary's reality from John's story of Jesus' resurrection, so Duccio also uses his 'reality' to bring the sacred into the world we know; heaven in ordinarie.
With grateful thanks to my 'picture researcher', Sonia Mundey.
