C h r o n i c l e s ...

Take the example of the St John in the Wilderness. Suppose we know nothing of the artist, the world of Christian convictions, and the traditions behind the theme; what can we make out of this picture of saint lost in thought?

Certainly we can describe what we see, give a faithful report of it and all in the right order: a man is seated in the foreground with his cheek resting on one hand; the halo around his head tells us he is a saint. He sits dreaming, thinking, meditating in the loveliest, most subtle, most tenderly green of landscapes, as the sun sets amid the flutter of wings, the piping of birds and the gentle ripping of the brook to which a stag has come down to drink. Behind him a lamb and nothing could be more gentle than a lamb.

The entire situation and scene, looked at with twenty-century eyes, is decidedly unrealistic. Is this a figment of the imagination of a saintly artist? Or it making a concrete statement connected in some way with a particular task set by the artist. The question can only be answered in part because the link between real life and work of art has been forgotten.

The theme of the picture has to do with the pictorial and biblical tradition concerning St. John the Baptist who, as forerunner, prepared the way for Christ as “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”. We know then the immediate significance of the lamb in the painting and the saint waiting for the prophecy to come to pass and for the Lamb to come to him for Baptism.

However, curiously, why were John and the Lamb painted in proximity to each other and yet without any immediate significant connection? There is nothing in the picture to reflect the declaration that “Christ must increase and John must decrease”.

According to Wikipedia, the artist belonged to a house of the order of the Knights of Saint John. To know the answer, we need to know more about the Order.

There is another aspect to the painting which is not easy to interpret. As the Bible tells it, John the Baptist was not dweller in a green and fertile land, not did he ever own such lavish drapery. His home was the "voice of one crying in wilderness' for repentance, and he was “clothed with camel’s hair, and with a girdle of a skin about his loins; and he did eat locusts and wild honey”. This contradiction between the miserable circumstance described in biblical and legendary accounts and the ornateness with which artists pictured them is not personal to Geergen. It runs through all the art of the time. As in the late medieval lives of the saints, the poverty of the first Christians we read about in the bible was transformed into something splendid and even lavish. No wonder, then, that in paintings of the time, the birth of Christ in humble manger was transplanted into settings of noble architecture and attended by richly clad witnesses.