IT WAS unprecedented when it was painted in 1342, and it continues to be profoundly unsettling. Nobody has ever been quite sure what to call it: The Holy Family? Christ Discovered within the Temple? It doesn’t match the expectations of either title.
There isn’t any sign of a constructing that might be the Temple, and these three figures, set in golden space, are demonstrably struggling as a family — the body language leaves us in little question that we now have are available in on the climax of a nasty row. While Joseph tries to mediate, a petulant young Jesus defiantly folds his arms and appears silently, sullenly, down at — one might almost say, on — the Virgin Mary, who is just not only his mother but, to any 14th-century viewer, the symbol of the Church itself.
Is this really how the adolescent Son of God behaves? To those that first saw this painting, it will need to have seemed as shocking and unseemly because the undiplomatic spat that we recently witnessed within the Oval Office. Every conventional norm, every expectation of decorous behaviour, has here been disregarded. Supremely beautiful, it sets out to be an uncomfortable picture, and so it is maybe appropriate to the beginning of Lent.
IT IS painted on a picket panel, with rare and expensive pigments sure in egg-yolk: frame and painting, conceived together, are gilded exquisitely on the front, marbled on the back. The sides have been rigorously finished; so we will ensure that it was, from the start, a stand-alone image.
At the lower edge, the inscription tells us “Simon of Siena painted me within the 12 months of our Lord, 1342.” This is Simone Martini, celebrated across Europe, whose works by this point adorned each the Cathedral and the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, and who, in 1342, was working in Avignon, then the seat of the popes, in exile from Rome. The scale of the panel is intimate (45 × 39cm): it’s clearly intended for close looking, and personal meditation.
The text on Mary’s open book, “Fili, quid fecisti nobis sic?” tells us what we’re invited to contemplate: the explosive confrontation recounted in Luke 2.48-49. After three days of searching, Mary and Joseph have just found the 12-year-old Jesus debating within the Temple. Predictably, parental relief turns rapidly to recrimination, starting with the Latin words that we see: “Son, why have you ever treated us so? Your father and I actually have been searching for you anxiously.” Jesus’s reply has the brutality of the adolescent who knows precisely how most to wound. “How is it that you just were searching for me? Did you not know that I should be in my father‘s house?”
How could his mother, in any case that she had been told about her son, possibly not know what he could be doing? And Jesus had been doing the bidding of his real, his heavenly, father — nothing to do with this man whose hand is affectionately on his shoulder, urging him to be kind to his distressed mother. It is a devastating rebuff to each, and the more hurtful since it is — as they have to know — unquestionably true.
THIS moment should command our particular attention; for these cruel truths are Jesus’s first recorded words: our first, disturbing glimpse of how the incarnate God behaves to those that love him. This is already recognisably the person who, later in Luke (14.26), will say that anyone who doesn’t hate his own father and mother, wife and kids, brothers and sisters, can’t be his disciple. Poignantly, that is Joseph’s last appearance within the boy’s story.
Yet, so far as we all know, no person before Simone had illustrated these two verses, with their resounding rejection of family ties — and only a few artists have since. There is a wealth of images for the verses just before, showing the 12-year-old Jesus arguing with the teachers within the Temple, while Mary and Joseph look on from a distance, for all of the world like proud parents at a graduation ceremony. And the Church welcomed commentaries, sculptures, paintings, and prints on the moment after the row (Luke 2.51), when Jesus — now an exemplar of filial humility — went back to Nazareth with Mary and Joseph “and was obedient to them”.
That is emphatically not the Jesus of this painting. One of its most striking features is the position of Mary, his mother — our mother, the Church. Unlike the enthroned Virgin and Child presiding over Simone’s huge Maestà, in Siena, here Mary is on a cushion within the corner, the bottom person within the composition. Simone does sometimes paint Mary sitting on the bottom, but then she is venerated because the Virgin of Humility. Not here. This is Mary, not humble, but humbled — and by her divine child. We will not be watching Jesus squabbling along with his mother: that is Christ reproaching the Church for her failure to know his true nature and calling.
WE DO not know who commissioned the image, but we do know a bit in regards to the Avignon by which it was made. In the previous years, town had heard vigorous debates, led by radical Franciscans, about apostolic poverty, in regards to the Church’s proper relation to wealth and power, and whether it was right for the Pope to stay in Avignon (effectively under the control of the French king).
In April 1342, Pope Benedict XII — formerly an austere Cistercian monk who had dreamed of taking the papacy back to Italy — died. Within days, a really different successor was elected: Clement VI, an unashamed nepotist, who immediately began lavishly decorating the Palais des Papes in Avignon, determined to live there sumptuously, and who in every respect earned his nickname Clément le Magnifique.
In that 12 months, and in that context, what did Simone’s picture mean? Is it significant that, while Joseph wears expensive shoes, Jesus has (?radical Franciscan) sandals? Is this a painted challenge to the brand new leader of a Church that was in every sense within the flawed place? that relished privilege, and put family connections above the service of God?
HOWEVER it was read in 1342, this is just not an image limited to a selected event in a selected place. It shows three figures, but five beings: from the spandrels at the highest, two seraphim, incised within the gold, look down. The link between heaven and earth can’t be broken. We see a perpetual predicament: the acutely uncomfortable consequences of the incarnation, which we frequently prefer to duck. It isn’t any surprise that this has not been a preferred subject.
Six hundred years later, what does the image mean to us, as our Church also appoints a latest leader? Is our Church within the flawed place? Do we’d like to rethink its relations with power and privilege, property and money? And how do its teachings about family values sit with the uncomfortable words of Jesus, or the realities of our world? In this little painting, Simone Martini offers us all a Lenten challenge.
Neil MacGregor is a former director of the British Museum and the creator of Living with the Gods (Allan Lane, 2018).
Simone Martini’s The Holy Family is currently on show on the National Gallery, in “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350” (until 22 June).
