So this episode, we'll explore John the Baptist's time in the wilderness. I think one of the
ideal pictures to discuss is Giovanni di Paolo's 'Young John the Baptist'. It's one of my favorite
pictures of the scene.
You can see the young boy of a bit of an indeterminate age. He looks like a pre-teen here, leaving
the crenellated, fortified walls of an Italian Renaissance City. You can see he's just stepping
out of that city gate into the wilderness. The young boy is actually represented twice.
You see he's both in the lower left and then up again, we see him as he ventures into sort
of quite scary-looking hills.
Crazy shapes in the mountains. And it's interesting that in the European imagination, desert simply
meant empty space but empty space in Europe isn't sandy desert as we might think of it.
It's just where people don't live. For that reason, I find it especially interesting with
as you say, he's not just making one transition. He looks to me like little Dick Whittington
with his knapsack over his shoulder but the doing the opposite of Dick Whittington because
he's not going off to the big city. He's quitting the big city, heading off into the countryside.
But he isn't even going to be satisfied with the cultivated countryside. He really wants
to go to where no one lives and that's up in the mountains in his second appearance,
in his second transition. Two sorts of boundaries are crossed in his journey.
It dramatizes that distance, doesn't it? I love how Giovanni di Paolo's represented this.
He's created this sort of aerial perspective of the cultivated land. You can see the patches
of green. Much as that's what you see when you fly over them today, that's how you read
the earth from above.
What a feat of imagination.
It's just so clever. He's left that cultivated land and as you say, he's making, winding
his way up into these very ominous looking rocks.
It's interesting you say he could be pre-teen because some of the very early church fathers
commenting on material that isn't in the Bible, imagining what John might have been doing
as it were between the first part of his story when he was born and named and then his appearance
on the banks of the river Jordan. They imagined that almost as soon as he could walk, he headed
off into the wilderness. That was important in their minds because he had to be kept pure.
That the task, the great task he would have of baptising Christ required him to be pure.
The best place to stay pure is in the wilderness so off he goes, pretty much as soon as possible
which means that he can't be reliant on any of the ordinary things, the comforts of life
that go with the city life or even cultivated rural life. He's got to be radically reliant
on God and on the things of wild nature.
The youth that he's represented as enhances this idea of his vulnerability and the need
to rely both on God and on his own self-sufficiency. Actually, we have another painting in the
National Gallery by an unknown Italian artist that is the next step. This is an artist imagining
how John might have been self-sufficient in the wilderness. I think we should have a look
at that next.
Wonderful.
Ben, I've brought you up here to Conservation so we could have a closer look at a painting
that's not currently on display.
Now, we're skipping ahead 200 years in the history of art. We moved from mid-15th century
to mid-17th century. We have here a representation by an Italian artist, we don't know who, of
John the Baptist in the wilderness. You see he's a little bit older than he was portrayed
in the Giovanni di Paolo.
A teenager.
I was suggesting that this painting might allude to how the Baptist was self-sufficient
in the wilderness. I wanted to draw your attention to this ingenious little invention that he
seems to have made.
There's a natural spring coming out from the rock which he's channeled using a reed, the
same sort of material as his famous reed cross.
Yes, his attribute
Propped in the cleft of another reed. Extraordinarily, therefore sort of echoing the cruciform shape,
a crossbar and an upright. Yet this cross channels to him the water of life, the water
that he depends on. That's theologically, very rich, isn't it?
Very eloquent. The idea that the wilderness isn't just a place of absence, it could actually provide.
It reminds me too of Moses feeding the Israelites in the wilderness. As lead them through, he
struck ... there's a story of Moses striking a rock and water flowed out of it. So again,
the provision the provision by God in the wilderness of water. There's something that
the Baptist, like Moses, again, a sort of tradition of Old Testament prophet-hood, that he channels.
And obviously, water being so key to the figure of the Baptist, anticipating the future baptisms
that he will perform. And sort of the next moment, you wonder then, "What happens to
the Baptist in the wilderness?" Actually, I've asked Conservation to display another
picture that we own just beside here for us to have a look at.
This is Moretto da Brescia's painting from the early 1520's it's an extremely unusual
iconography. You have a kneeling John the Baptist, a little older than we've seen him.
He's come from boy to a teenager. Now, he's a young man.
Yes, grown man. He's kneeling quite humbly at the banks of the river Jordan, we can imagine, perhaps.
You actually have Christ in a gesture of blessing before him.
There's a very famous line in the Gospels about the relation between the two, Christ
and John the Baptist in which the Baptist says of Christ, "He must increase and I must
decrease. There's one who comes after me who is greater than I am and he must increase
and I must decrease." The way they're related to each other, physically, expresses just
that change in relationship. He's falling down onto his knees.
In humility.
Christ on slightly higher ground, raising his hand above him.
And there's something very interesting about this steep, rocky path. You almost imagine
that after being blessed by Christ, the young Baptist might stand up and make his way back
into the city.
To me it looks almost like a moment of ordination or at least commissioning, as if Christ is
saying, "Now, you're ready to go and begin your public ministry." He's about to go public
and begin the preaching for which he's famous, on the banks of the Jordan and all the city
of Jerusalem is going to discover him and come out to find out what he's got to say.
And we'll focus on the preaching in our next episode.