Hi my name is Ayla Lepine, I'm the Ahmanson Fellow in Art and Religion here at the National Gallery and today I'm going to be exploring the question why is this man depicted twice and what can that tell us about miracles. This small painting by Duccio is one of the earliest in the National Gallery's collection. It's a fascinating image which is part of a much bigger altarpiece. The National Gallery has three panels from that giant double-sided altarpiece, which is from Siena from the Cathedral in the early 14th century. It was constructed between about 1307 1308 and 1311. The panel that we're looking at today is most likely from towards the end of that period. The three panels that the gallery has are part of the predella which is the lower section of that altarpiece. We have an image of the annunciation we have our image for today Christ healing a man who was born blind and right next to it we have an image which is called 'The Transfiguration'. All of these are from the Bible's New Testament and our story is from the Gospel of John from chapter nine. In this image we see something extraordinary which is really easy to miss because it looks like a pretty unremarkable little figure just here and this little figure has a stick has little red boots has a brown cloak and has a little carrying case which is attached to him by a rope. He's having an incredible miraculous encounter with Jesus. So what's happening here is that we have a crowd who are pressing in on Jesus behind and all of them are fascinated by what's happening here. And here we have an image of Christ in his blue robe with little bits of gold edging as he does something very very strange. In the story he's just been on the ground making a paste of soil and his own saliva. Then he takes that paste and he rubs it onto the man's eyes and here we can see him doing it with just one finger and it looks very gentle. Christ is giving this man his full attention and this person with his eyes closed is experiencing this miracle right that very moment in Duccio's painting. You might miss that it is the same man who is just over here. So what Duccio has done is he's positioned that figure facing Jesus here and then turning around 180 degrees in the next part of the story. As you can see he's dropped his stick, his hand is open perhaps in a gesture of wonder or surprise, and his eyes are focused on something that in this little panel we can't see. You might notice that down below he's got his other hand in some water which Duccio has painted beautifully with these little wavy lines. That's something called the pool of Siloam. Duccio depicting this man twice in this way is relatively rare, however, in this period people would have been used to seeing something like a sequence of narratives in scripture depicted simultaneously in one image especially in altarpieces in Pradellas like this one. So the opportunity to be able to read this image left to right, where we see this moment and then this moment in the same panel, is maybe comparable to something like a comic strip for us today. And notice what this man is looking at. This panel which we have in the national gallery would have also been the next panel along in that gigantic altarpiece the Siena Maestà, which I explained earlier, and so what that man is looking at is this miraculous image. This man is depicted twice. Jesus himself across the threshold of this panel is also depicted twice. Here we can see him as someone who looks relatively ordinary, though he has his gold halo, he has both his feet firmly planted on the ground, and firmly planted in buildings and areas that look surprisingly perhaps like Sienna itself. Duccio is doing something really clever here. He is depicting this moment, this miracle, in a place that looks awfully like Sienna. His home city and the city that people were living in when they were milling around the Cathedral and when they were coming into the cathedral for worship. This is a familiar space with a familiar story even though those stories are hundreds and hundreds of years apart. So this is an extraordinary image that shows Jesus with his blue cloak with that gold edging and that image connects deeply with the next miracle that we see in the panel which is just next to that miraculous image of Jesus healing the man who had been born blind. This image shows something called the Transfiguration. This is one of the most precious moments in the whole of the gospels. One of the most powerful accounts of the transfiguration is in the Gospel of Matthew and what happens there is that Jesus takes some of his disciples Peter, James, and John up to a high mountain. We are no longer in the familiar surroundings of Siena, in its everyday life that Duccio has painted with this extraordinary Biblical narrative. Here Duccio has rooted this Biblical narrative in the space of Heaven. In the realm of some kind of mysterious threshold, and mountains are really important in Hebrew Bible and New Testament accounts, where Heaven and earth meet. You can see that by how much gold he's using, and you can see that in what's happened to Jesus' robe. What we saw as blue with gold edging in the previous panel we now see shot through with the glory and the beauty of gold of heavenly light. Shot through with this amazing sense of heavenly radiance and the gospel writer Matthew he even struggles to put this into words, "it shone whiter than the brightest light". It was this beautiful thing which no one
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had ever seen before. And there is a voice in this story, it's the voice of God the Father himself from heaven, "this is my Son, I love him, listen to Him". So now we have seeing, and we have hearing, and we have an everyday insight through this incredible miracle to what Jesus can do, and who Jesus is. Here we have an additional insight into who Jesus really is, and what he can do. Because this image, on the threshold of heaven, shows us that this person here is none other than the Son of God. So in the sequence of the altarpiece what we have is an image of this man shown twice, facing Jesus and then facing away having been healed and cured, and then we have Jesus across the threshold shown twice. Here, and here. And here, like the blind man, he has somehow been changed mysteriously. So Jesus in these stories, and Duccio in his arrangement of these stories, is showing us that there is something so precious that is happening here not only for this person but also for his community, and also in the whole realm of Christian belief about who Jesus is as the Son of God. Fully human and fully divine. I think it's so important to speak for a moment about what might be meant by blindness here. There is something so important here about the way that blindness connects metaphorically to the blindness of the community within which Jesus is operating. He's saying to people you do not see spiritually, inwardly, because you do not love and embrace this man just as he is. People come to Jesus and they ask, whose fault is it that this man was born blind? Is it his fault? Is it his parents fault? And Jesus says it's nobody's fault. This man is beautiful, and perfect, and glorious, and gorgeous. A beloved child of God just as he is, and yet so that you can start to understand who I am, I am going to heal him in front of you, like we see this miracle taking place in the altarpiece in front of us. We see something which is beyond the realm of physics and beyond the realm of expectation, and it's so earthy in this story. It's soil and saliva, it's washing in a pool, and Duccio has chosen to show those earthly aspects of this story in a very clear way. And so what might have been the view about miracles in 14th century Siena? Miracles were things that, just like I've described, that might happen, that were beyond physics, that somehow showed the abundance of God's love, compassion, and mercy. There would have been countless people coming to Siena Cathedral praying for a miracle in their own lives inspired by that story. So for those people at that time, and for many christians around the world today, this story is not some ancient strange idea from another time and another place, it's a story that can inspire hope today. But let's be clear especially in terms of disability and inclusion that Jesus is not saying that blindness is a problem. He's saying that the inner spiritual blindness of communities that marginalise and exclude people, that is the problem. And He takes the opportunity of transforming the life of the man who is born blind, shown twice here, in order to demonstrate that deeper truth to absolutely everyone who is a beloved child of God in this tradition. If you'd like to learn more about art history you can click here or here, and you can subscribe to our youtube channel. thank you so much for watching today, and we'll see you next time. [Music]
