IT WAS unprecedented when it was painted in 1342, and it is still profoundly unsettling. Nobody has ever been quite sure what to call it: The Holy Family? Christ Discovered in the Temple? It doesn’t match the expectations of either title.
There is no sign of a building that could be the Temple, and these three figures, set in golden space, are demonstrably struggling as a family — the body language leaves us in no doubt that we have come in at the climax of a nasty row. While Joseph tries to mediate, a petulant young Jesus defiantly folds his arms and looks silently, sullenly, down at — one might almost say, on — the Virgin Mary, who is 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 who first saw this painting, it must have seemed as shocking and unseemly as the undiplomatic spat that we recently witnessed in 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 perhaps appropriate to the start of Lent.
IT IS painted on a wooden panel, with rare and expensive pigments bound in egg-yolk: frame and painting, conceived together, are gilded exquisitely on the front, marbled on the back. The sides have been carefully finished; so we can be sure that it was, from the beginning, a stand-alone image.
At the lower edge, the inscription tells us “Simon of Siena painted me in the year of our Lord, 1342.” This is Simone Martini, celebrated across Europe, whose works by this point adorned both 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 is clearly intended for close looking, and private meditation.
The text on Mary’s open book, “Fili, quid fecisti nobis sic?” tells us what we are 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 in the Temple. Predictably, parental relief turns rapidly to recrimination, beginning with the Latin words that we see: “Son, why have you treated us so? Your father and I have been looking for you anxiously.” Jesus’s reply has the brutality of the adolescent who knows precisely how most to wound. “How is it that you were looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my father‘s house?”
How could his mother, after all that she had been told about her son, possibly not know what he would 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 both, and the more hurtful because it is — as they must 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 who love him. This is already recognisably the man who, later in Luke (14.26), will say that anyone who does not hate his own father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, cannot be his disciple. Poignantly, this is Joseph’s last appearance in the boy’s story.
Yet, as far as we know, nobody before Simone had illustrated these two verses, with their resounding rejection of family ties — and very 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 in the Temple, while Mary and Joseph look on from a distance, for all 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 in the corner, the lowest person in the composition. Simone does sometimes paint Mary sitting on the ground, but then she is venerated as the Virgin of Humility. Not here. This is Mary, not humble, but humbled — and by her divine child. We are not watching Jesus squabbling with his mother: this is Christ reproaching the Church for her failure to understand his true nature and calling.
WE DO not know who commissioned the picture, but we do know a bit about the Avignon in which it was made. In the previous years, the city had heard vigorous debates, led by radical Franciscans, about apostolic poverty, about the Church’s proper relation to wealth and power, and whether it was right for the Pope to remain 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 very 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 year, 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 new leader of a Church that was in every sense in the wrong place? that relished privilege, and put family connections above the service of God?
HOWEVER it was read in 1342, this is not a picture limited to a particular event in a particular place. It shows three figures, but five beings: from the spandrels at the top, two seraphim, incised in the gold, look down. The link between heaven and earth cannot be broken. We see a perpetual predicament: the acutely uncomfortable consequences of the incarnation, which we often prefer to duck. It is no surprise that this has not been a popular subject.
Six hundred years later, what does the picture mean to us, as our Church also appoints a new leader? Is our Church in the wrong place? Do we need 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 author of Living with the Gods (Allan Lane, 2018).
Simone Martini’s The Holy Family is currently on show at the National Gallery, in “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350” (until 22 June).
