Christ in Art by Ernest Renan

Author:Ernest Renan [Renan, Ernest]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Art, Subjects & Themes, Religious, History, Ancient & Classical, Medieval, Human Figure, General
ISBN: 9781783107803
Google: 1XalCgAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 8244353
Publisher: Parkstone Press
Published: 2008-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo,

The Infant Christ Asleep on the Cross, 1670s.

Oil on canvas, 141 x 108 cm. Museums

Sheffield, Graves Gallery, Sheffield.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, The Heavenly

and Earthly Trinities, c. 1675-1682.

Oil on canvas, 293 x 207 cm.

The National Gallery, London.

Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Christ Healing the

Paralytic at the Pool of Bethesda, 1667-1670.

Oil on canvas, 237 x 261 cm.

The National Gallery, London.

His legend was thus the fruit of a great, altogether spontaneous conspiracy, and was worked out about him while he was yet alive. No great event of history has passed without giving rise to a cycle of fables, and Jesus could not, had he wished, have silenced these popular creations. Perhaps a sagacious eye could have recognized, even then, the germ of the stories which were to attribute to him a supernatural birth, either in consequence of the notion generally received in antiquity, that the extraordinary man cannot be born of the ordinary relations between the sexes; or to fulfil a misunderstood chapter of Isaiah, in which a prophecy was seen, that the Messiah should be born of a virgin; or finally to carry out the idea that the “Breath of God,” already set up in the divine hypostasis, is a principle of fecundity. Even then, perhaps, there circulated concerning his childhood more than one anecdote intended to show in his biography the accomplishment of the Messianic ideal, or, to speak more correctly, of the policies which the allegorical exegesis of the time upheld to the Messiah. At other times, there were created for him relations from the cradle with celebrated men, John the Baptist, Herod the Great, who, it was said, about that time made a journey to Jerusalem, two aged persons, Simeon and Anna, who had left memories of lofty sanctity. A rather loose chronology presided over these combinations, which were for the most part founded upon real distorted occurrences. But a singular spirit of sweetness and of goodness, a profoundly popular sentiment, penetrated all these fables, and made them a supplement to the teachings. After the death of Jesus especially, such stories were largely developed. We may believe, however, that they were already in circulation while he was living, without encountering anything more than a pious credulity and an artless wonder.

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