Notes from the Water

John the Baptist by Donatello, polychrome on wood, 1438

Today is the feast of the Baptism of the Lord, or the Theophany. I began my morning as I often do, with an audio Ignatian meditation on the day’s scripture. It is rare that I am able to imagine a biblical scene immediately when asked to, usually I struggle with it and drop it, only to find myself surprised by how it appears in my mind later in the day.

The morning’s sermon by the Dean of our Cathedral may have opened my imagination through its clarity and scope. (You can listen to it by clicking HERE). Also in my mind has been an illustration I made for the feast some years ago, which you will find below.

The baptism of Jesus is a complicated scene—especially when you indulge in conflating all the gospel versions of it and in embellishing the result. We have John clad in camel hair, with the antenna of a locust stuck in his teeth, admonishing the crowd (“You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”) so they would remember their sins and repent of them.

And then Jesus, his cousin, approaches him. It is as if Jesus, rather than the crowd, which, if of more decent appearance would be in a different scene, needs to be cleansed. Jesus, who always knew more and better than John, who, even as a twelve-year-old, sat in the synagogue and astounded everyone with his understanding.

Others there who knew Jesus were also surprised to see him wade into the Jordan. The air around him acquired an opaqueness as it parted with the certain bearing of his being.

There had been rumors surrounding Jesus’ birth. While his parents were holy and good by all accounts, there was an unlikeliness about their lives that followed them everywhere and made those around them unsettled and inclined to question.

“Why, you?” John croaked at his cousin. He gaped like an old wine skin, ruddy from the sun, raw-red where the end of his wet camel hair tunic scraped repeatedly against his knee.

John had made the crowd feel desperate with the words he shouted from the wilderness. The words had turned them out of themselves and drove them into the wilderness to hear more. Now the crowd averted their eyes from the one they hoped would save them as they heard John ask Jesus to baptize him instead.

Then they remembered, vague in the heat, something about a greater one to come wearing dirty sandals.

“No. It is fitting,” Jesus said. John’s studied his cousin’s eyes. His face tautened. He nodded and stretched out his hands……..

Baptism of Jesus by Brynna Carpenter-Nardone

Blessing the Animals with Jerome and Dürer

Today is the feast day of St. Jerome who was said to have tamed a lion.

Today I write as if while looking at a series of portraits. There is the purportedly crotchety and certainly prolific Saint Jerome (died on this day in 420), depicted by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) with a lion and dog.

I think of the lion and dog and their portraits as I look forward to drawing before our Blessing of the Animals service this Sunday, October 4. I will begin to draw charcoal portraits at 2 PM to benefit children in Haiti before the short service begins at 3 PM—click HERE for the flyer.

Dürer himself was the subject of a recent NY Times illustrated article on the self-portrait—see it by clicking HERE. The article proposes that Dürer, in his last painted self-portrait, appears as only Christ had been depicted before. This later painting bears the monogram Dürer developed from the letters A and D—his own initials, and perhaps also a reference to “anno domini,” the year marking Christ’s birth.

During his first visit to Italy, Dürer had written back to a friend still in Germany, "How I shall freeze after this sun! Here I am a gentleman, at home only a parasite." It was when he arrived home that Dürer put his monogram to use, lending stature to the job, “artist,” by making art bear the signature of its maker.

The monogram as self-identifier is itself a sort of self-portrait. It occupies a corner of a work not unlike a skull or “memento mori” that began its appearance in art in earlier times as reminder of mortality to both artist and onlooker.

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“The Ambassadors” painted by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1533, has a memento mori at the bottom made visible by viewing the portrait from close to its lower right side and turning to look to the left. Watch Dr. Kat’s video to further explore the painting by clicking HERE.

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Dürer’s monogram appears in his etching of St. Jerome opposite a memento mori—a human skull. I have always assumed that Dürer identified with the hard-working writing and translating saint whom he depicted in the medieval study with his pets at his feet.

Jerome wrote, “The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.” Perhaps Dürer thought of this as he reflected himself in Jerome. It recalls scriptural references that hearken back to the original portrait in Genesis—the man and woman whom God created as a self-likeness.

Is it this God-likeness that Dürer felt gave him authority to paint himself as Christ’s likeness in his third and last painted self-portrait? Might the entire painting be a memento mori—an integration of image and inscription which reads in Durer’s first painted self-portrait, “Things happen to me as is written on high?”