Piero della Francesca's The Baptism of Christ

Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ (c 1440), egg tempera on wood, National Gallery, London

Last year’s exhibition at The National Gallery in London,  Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look, brought together works by David Hockney and Piero della Francesca and succeeded, for me at least, in encouraging me to look longer and more closely at the one of the gallery’s most prized Italian Renaissance possessions, The Baptism of Christ, an altar-piece painting which its first director Sir Charles Eastlake made the centrepiece of the collection when it was acquired in 1861.

The work is remarkable because on the one hand it depicts a crucially reverential moment in the New Testament when the prophet known as John the Baptist pours water over the head of Jesus in preparation for God’s judgement by repenting sins in a symbolic and ceremonial act of cleansing; the scene has been referred to by theologians as a ‘theophany’, a moment when God’s presence is made manifest to man. On the other hand, and as an accompaniment to this momentously holy episode, Piero depicts a figure stripping off in the right-hand background in preparation for his own baptism which, to my modern eyes at least, looks bathetic. As he struggles off his shift, the figure reveals the Judean equivalent of a pair of Y-fronts. It’s the pictorial juxtaposition of the sacred and the worldly that fascinates. I think it speaks to the theological debate that has existed for centuries: was Jesus divine or human, and in my view places Piero firmly in the ‘Jesus was God’ camp, but with him acknowledging what it was like to be merely mortal in the presence of divinity; it is the ordinariness of the articulation of the undressing figure that feels mundane, a figure which much more clearly occupies the earthly realm than the figures of Christ and the chorus of angels. So, Piero does two things, he depicts the apotheosis of Jesus with due veneration, in a strangely shadowless and uncanny setting but brackets him as if he (Christ) just happened to be one of any unseen number in the queue for the water dousing treatment, getting their kit off somewhat prosaically in preparation.

The bearded and long-haired Christ stands at the centre of the painting, his pale and hairless body is naked save for a transparent loincloth. His feet are unshod, and his gaze is lowered, with his hands almost coming together in prayer (a space is left between the fingers of each hand). He stands, slightly contrapposto, while a trickle of water scooped from the River Jordan that laps at their feet at the foot of the painting is poured onto his head from John’s bowl. Look closely and you can see an incipient golden halo above the crown of Christ’s head, the artist’s affirmation of his sanctity.

John, pictured in profile, has his left leg poised one pace behind the other for balance, while his left arm and hand are tensed. The lowest edge of his robe is tattered, indicating his poverty and the roughness of his living conditions. In the gospels the robe is described as made of camel hair, cinched by a leather belt. John’s height, the hair, beard and facial features look very similar to the baptisee’s and emphasise the idea of John as a prototype Christ.

The three angel figures to the left, are witnesses like us the viewer, to the divine significance of this epiphany. A worried frown plays over the brow of the central angel while the one on the right, whose arm rests on the shoulder of the other and holds her left hand as a gesture of comfort, looks away from Jesus and into a distance far beyond where we stand. The bible tells us that at this moment, God’s voice was heard: ‘And lo a voice from heaven, saying, this is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.’ Thus, the painting represents the presence of the Holy Trinity: the voice of God the father, the holy spirit in the form of a dove and God the son in Jesus. The pink, blue and gold feathers of the left-hand angel are picked up in the stole of the one on the right and the coronet of the central one, so that there is a colour harmony to this, making of them a subordinate trinity to complement the presence of the primary one. The foreshortened dove hovers above Christ’s head face-on towards us and looks down on him with wings outstretched as if in a gesture of God’s benevolence. The clouds in the sky mirror its outstretched form as if to suggest a more general benefaction from the heavens above.

In the distance beyond the disrobing figure stand four tall-hatted men whose clothing is reflected in the mirror-like surface of the water. Scholars have suggested that these represent figures from the Eastern Orthodox church who joined their Western Catholic colleagues in the Council of Florence 1431-1449 to try to reunify after the doctrinal schism that had arisen in the eleventh century. There may also be here an echo of the magi, present at the birth of Jesus. In the far distance behind Christ, we can see the buildings of a small town. This is not a depiction of the real Holy Land but has been identified as Borgo San Sansepolcro, Piero’s hometown, named after the Holy Sepulchre, the place where Jesus was interred after his crucifixion, so making a possible link in the painting between the birth of Jesus, the inception of his divinity with his baptism and its earthly endpoint the sepulchre – another trio, this time of events and places.

The painting was made using two wooden panels, the join between which can now be seen bisecting the figure of Christ and running through the bowl and the dove in a way that reminds us of the essential symmetry of the work. However, the composition is effectively a tripartite one, the first third of which comprises the tree trunk and angels, the second of which shows the central figure of Christ and dove and the final third on the right shows John, the undresser and the wise men. Christ’s upper arms form a triangle that points up to the dove, another echo of the trinity theme and their positioning is a significant contributor to the overall sense of balance and harmony in the composition.

The walnut tree is shown in full leaf, so suggesting a summer setting, and represents the tree of life, connecting to the earth via its roots and to the heavens as its branches and leaves mass in darkness at the top centre of the work. The bark has the same pallor as Christ’s body and the angels that stand beside it, denoting an affinity between the celestial and the terrestrial-temporal domains. Its relative prominence felt unusual to me. While it helps to demarcate the trinitarian space of the composition, it was too dominant to not have some other significance. So, I researched it a little further to find that it is likely to be a reference to a verse in the Book of Psalms: ‘And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.’

The Baptism of Christ is a beautiful, contemplative work, rich in its layers of symbolism and allegory and at the same time, arresting for its thought-provoking oddities, many of which I would have overlooked had I not been rewarded by that suggested ‘longer look’.