Carl Bloch: The Life of Christ in Art

Our family visited the Carl Bloch paintings exhibit at the Brigham Young University Art Museum over the Thanksgiving holiday, 2010.  It was a wonderful experience.   I have never been so moved by an art exhibit before.  Even though I have been using the Carl Bloch New Testament paintings in my personal studies and teaching for over 30 years, I was still surprised by their power.  

When I first saw The Denial of Peter  years ago, I doubted that it was historically accurate. I was  most familiar with the Gospel of Mathew because I had used it the most often in my study.  In Mathew there is no hint that Peter ever saw Jesus in person during the trials.  But in The Denial of Peter,  Bloch places Peter in a courtyard just as Jesus is being led away by Roman soldiers, and just as the cock is crowing for the third time.  Jesus’s eyes are on Peter, and Peter is turning away in shame.  I once thought that Bloch was taking artistic license with that interpretation.  But then one day I noticed the passage in Luke 22 describing how, at the moment the cock crowed, “Jesus looked upon Peter”.  None of the other three Gospels mentions that fact.  Bloch had to be intimately familiar with all four Gospels to have been aware of that subtle detail.  By doing so, he captured one of the most poignant moments of the Passion. 

   My favorite example of Carl Bloch’s scripture mastery, however, is The Meeting of Mary and Elizabeth.  When I first studied it, I noticed a little lizard on the ground in the lower left corner of the image.  (The bottom of this painting is often cut off when it is reproduced in publications.  You may not see the lizard in the copy you are looking at. )  I long thought that it was just a whimsical touch.  Then one year I was preparing a Christmas lesson for a Sunday School class.  I decided to study the Nativity story from all four Gospels, compare them, and draw out the most important points from all four.  But the Gospel of John doesn’t have a Nativity story.  Nothing.  That was a little disturbing.  I wondered if John had written anything about the birth of Christ.  So I searched through the Book of Revelation (also written by John) on the chance that there might be something there.   At that time I came across Revelation Chapter 12, wherein John has a vision of Mary, being with child, and “pained to be delivered. And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns . . . and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.  And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne.”  Bloch’s little lizard doesn’t have seven heads or ten horns, but he is definitely looking right at Mary with an air of expectancy.  I think that Bloch was familiar with the vision of John, and included the lizard as an allusion to the ever-presence of Satan in the life of Christ.

Bloch also had a wonderful skill for making his paintings three-dimensional—the usual two dimensions of height and width, and the third dimension of time.  I have noticed two examples.

The first starts with The Twelve-Year-Old Jesus in the Temple.  Although the theme of the painting is definitely Christ teaching in the temple, there is that little Jewish boy prominently placed in the left foreground that steals your attention. Why?  He wears a white tunic falling off his left shoulder; he has a white sacrificial bird in a cage; and he looks expectantly at Mary and Joseph.  He seems to represent the children of Israel, ready to make their humble and obligatory sacrifice, but looking to Mary and Joseph for something better.  This painting hangs in Frederiksborg Castle.  Across the room hangs Cleansing of the Temple.   The theme of that painting is definitely Christ cleansing the temple.  The setting is about 18 years after he was first found in that same temple, perhaps in the same portico, teaching the learned men.  Perhaps it is some of those same learned men who now stand in the background, in the shadows, beginning to feel the jealousy  that would soon consume them.  But what else do we see?  Another  Jewish youth in the left foreground,  not so prominent this time, but with a white tunic falling off his left shoulder, and a white sacrificial bird in a cage.  Why, could it be the same young Jewish boy, 18 years later, grown up just as Jesus is? Now, he no longer looks expectantly for a new sacrifice.  Even as he holds the white sacrificial dove in his hand (most likely not the same dove!) , ready to carry out his Mosaic duty, his interest has turned to another bird, dirty and grey, not fit for sacrifice,  that has had its feathers ruffled.  Israel has grown older, but not wiser.  It took two paintings to convey that message.  Bloch took two two-dimensional images, gave them a third spatial dimension (spanning the room), and thereby created a fourth, temporal dimension to convey the message of Israel’s decline into idolatry. 

I find the same three-dimensional quality in Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda. Why does Bloch always seem to place unknown figures in the foreground of his paintings who seem to steal the viewer’s attention away from Christ?  Here, it’s the man in the red cap.  Certainly, Bloch wants us to focus on Christ and the lame man. But Christ is far from the center of the image.  Even the lame man, about to rise from his bed, is left of center in the image.  Why? Our attention is drawn almost equally to the man in the red cap, both by his ostentatious red cap and by his placement close to the central focus of the painting, a position closer to the midline than even Jesus. Who is he and why is he thrust into our view?  Underneath the makeshift tent next to him is the lame man who has been waiting thirty-eight years for someone to pick him up and place him in the pool.  What is their connection? 

If you hold your hand partly in front of your eyes and block out first the left half of the picture and then the right, dividing it precisely between the old cripple and the man in the red cap, you can see that there are actually two scenes.  On the left is the classic picture of the Savior approaching the crippled man and preparing to heal him from his infirmity.  The focus of that part of the picture is the Savior raising the lame man from his bed.  This portion of the picture is frequently used as an illustration in books and magazines, with the right part of the picture cropped off.  In fact, the left half of the painting is frequently published under the name Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda as if that were all there was to the original painting. 

But it is that right half, often overlooked and sometimes even omitted,  that I find most intriguing.  On the right is the man in the red cap, his leg wrapped as if in a bandage, staring blankly to his right. To his left, a woman with a young boy are standing by the water.  The man pays no attention to them.  The boy looks directly at the observer.  Your eyes meet his.   He is wearing a white robe.  He and his mother are the only characters whose images are reflected in the water.  What is happening here? What does Bloch want us to see in the right half of his painting? On the left side of the painting, Christ, attired in a white robe, visits the aged cripple.  What connects what is happening in the right side of the image with what is happening in the left?

The cripple and the man in the red cap are positioned like mirror images, equidistant from a vertical line dividing the right and left halves of the painting, and lying at the same elevation.  Again, they are positioned like mirror images.  I looked closer.  In prints, you can never make out the face of the old man under the tent.  But standing before the original painting, I could clearly see the old man’s face.  It’s the same face as the man in the red cap, only older, grayer, and longer in the beard.  I suddenly realized that they’re the same man, depicted twice, at different times, in the same painting.   They are there decades apart in time.  They are the same man at different times in his life.   On the right, Bloch depicts the man only a few years after he first arrived at the pool, infirm leg wrapped in a bandage, staring blankly into nothing because he has nothing to look for, no hope, no relief.  He has already been there for many years, failing endlessly to find his miracle.  For thirty-eight years he waited. Every day, his face was the same, his plight was the same, and he looked nowhere because he did not know where to look.  But now, what else do we see? The same man, thirty-eight years after his first arrival, decades after the day when the scene on the right occurred, with all the tattered, thread-bare garments, worn blankets, empty vessels, and other refuse of thirty-eight years lying around and above him, looking up into the face of the Savior, and of his salvation.  Bloch has given us, in one image, the entire thirty-eight years of that man’s pitiful life, as well as his final healing.

And the boy? He and Christ both wear the white robe of purity and salvation. The boy’s image is reflected in the healing water of the pool.  Above him, his mother is holding a bottle of water in a most awkward position.  Indeed, she holds it in a totally unnatural position, as if she had previously been holding it on her left shoulder with both hands, but she has now dropped her left hand down to the boy’s face, as if to present him, or draw attention to him, without moving the water bottle to her other shoulder.  Is there a special reason why that bottle of water, healing water, needs to be positioned directly over her son at that precise moment?   The boy looks at the observer as if wanting to say something to you through the centuries of intervening time.

If you cut the painting in half, you could still name both halves Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda.  To me, the woman and her son are Mary and Jesus, visiting the pool when he was about 8 years old.  His image reflected in the water expresses that the only real healing comes from him.  The bottle held above his head by Mary represents the living water that he brings to men.  The juxtaposition of the two images side by side suggests to me what a pity it was that the lame man, not knowing that Christ had come into the world, had to wait another 22 years to meet him personally and be healed.  He was kept from that knowledge by ignorance, tradition, and the failure of the Jews to teach their people the truth.

Forgive me one more indulgence—an artistic allusion which suits this painting but may not have been intended by Bloch. It is that Mary’s left leg, from the knee down, is bare. The boy Jesus leans against that leg.  Is there some symbolic  reason why Bloch chose to paint that leg as bare? Perhaps.

In some Masonic rites, when a candidate first begins his initiation into the order of Masonry, one of the first stages of the ceremony is to have the candidate remove his street clothes and replace them with ceremonial garments.  Curiously, his left pant leg is rolled up above the knee, and thus his left leg is bare from the knee to the toes.  In that state, the candidate is invited to kneel  and ceremonially declare his belief and trust in God, and in God alone.  Only after making that pledge is the candidate allowed to continue with his initiation.

Whether Carl Bloch intended this symbolism or not is impossible to say.  But it strikes me that one subtle message of the painting is that the lame man, for thirty eight years, has falsely placed his trust in the waters of the spring.  Instead, he should have placed his trust in the Lord’s healing powers.  

Finally, I am especially fond of Sermon on the Mount.   It seems to me to be another example of Bloch creating a focal point separate from Christ himself.  Christ sits prominently on a rock toward the right side of the image.  The Sermon, of course, features Christ teaching us how to find our way into the Kingdom of Heaven.  We know that from having read the Sermon.  It was undoubtedly the most divine, the most passionate, the most influential discourse ever given to mortal men.  Giovanni Papini called it “the greatest proof of the right of men to exist in the infinite universe. . . . the master-work of the Spirit at the height of its power . . .”  But limited by his medium, Bloch can only give us a visual image of Christ sitting on the rock,  pointing heaven-ward, his hand raised and his index finger pointing upward, his other fingers curled inward.  We cannot hear His words.  Bloch must have chafed under the frustration of not being able to represent, in imagery, the sublime utterances of the Savior at that moment.  He must have been mortified to realize that canvas and paint can never do justice to such divine instruction, that they can never capture the heavenly nature of the words themselves.  

Or did he?   Astronomers now study the universe by analyzing the light of stars that is reflected by distant dust clouds.  Did Bloch find a way to show us the Savior’s very words by how they are reflected in the faces of his listeners?   You scan the faces of those gathered around him.  Some of his listeners are worshipping, others aren’t even listening.  You examine them one by one. Each is reacting in his own way. 

One woman has her head bowed in the attitude of prayer.  The expression on her face is one of sorrow and remorse.  At first, you are impressed with her obvious piety.  She prays to God even while the Son of God sits before her in the flesh and answers her prayers.   But suddenly you realize that a butterfly has landed on her head, of which she is completely unaware.  Your immediate thought is that Bloch is being utterly disrespectful of her devotion and spirituality.  By toying with her, he makes a mockery of her prayer to the Savior.  Is he being crude, or just whimsical?  To make matters worse, Bloch has placed a child next to her. This child is being totally inattentive to the Son of God, and seems to care nothing whatsoever for the greatest speech ever given.  And what’s more, this child seems to be trying playfully to touch that silly butterfly.  Suddenly, you can’t take your eyes off this little dramatic corner of the painting.  Even with the Son of God sitting to the right, your eyes watch the child, waiting to see what is going to happen.

 I have since decided that this painting isn’t about Christ; it’s about the butterfly, the child, and the prayerful woman.    And it’s about a master artist who finds a way to use his brush-strokes to record and replay the divine words that we are otherwise two thousand years too late to hear.   The child isn’t paying attention to the Savior and he isn’t listening to the Lord’s instructions about how to enter the Kingdom of Heaven—because he doesn’t need to.  He’s already there.  Isn’t that the message of the Sermon? The way to enter the Kingdom of Heaven is simple—become as a little child.  But how, you say, can a man return to his childhood (or a woman return to hers)?   This child is pointing to the answer.  As you study him, you realize that he is not trying to touch the butterfly—he’s pointing at it.  His hand is configured the same way as Christ’s.  Christ points to heaven, and the child is pointing, with the same gesture, at the butterfly.

I wondered why.  I went to the library and found a book on ancient symbols.  What I learned is that the Greek word for “butterfly” is psyche.   In Greek, that word has a second meaning—“spirit” or “the spirit”.  Assuming that Bloch had studied his scriptures, and that he was familiar with the symbols used by the ancients in their art and literature, he would have known that.

I am convinced that Bloch intentionally placed this prayerful woman, the little boy, and the butterfly, in a second focal point of the painting.  His purpose was to capture not just the image of the Sermon, but its essence.  To convey that message, Bloch employed a seemingly whimsical image that is actually deeply symbolic.  The child himself lives in the Kingdom of Heaven.  As Christ shows us the way there in eloquent prose, the child points us the way by pointing to the butterfly on the woman’s head, as if pointing to her very  spirit,  as if to say, “this woman, by humbling herself and feeling true remorse for her sins, and by devoting herself to the Savior, has become like a little child, and thus found her way to the kingdom of God.”     He shows us that the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, as the Savior said, that it is in our individual spirits, and that we find it by repenting and becoming like a little child, in spirit.

That is why it really irritates me when people use  The Meeting of Mary and Elizabeth  or Sermon on the Mount  or Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda   as a book cover or an illustration, and cut off the bottom, or the left third, or the right half.  They can be forgiven for trying to put Christ in the center of the image, but by cutting out parts of the painting, they inadvertently delete its real message.

© Lary S. Larson 2009