BEN QUASH: Jenny, where better to begin this episode, which is thinking about baptism, than Salisbury Cathedral? Particularly Salisbury Cathedral, because it has this stupendous font that was installed recently in 2008. It's the most stunning visual object.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: It's extraordinary, because as you approach the font, the water is so still that it actually looks far more mirror-like with these amazing reflections of the stained glass. You don't realise it's water until you hear the sound of this pouring over the edges, and you realise that this is alive.
BEN QUASH: Living water is a wonderful way of putting it and, of course, deeply symbolic. This is the water in Christian tradition, the water of baptism gives life. The fact that it's moving all the time, not static, but moving all the time, I think, communicates that sense of life. The water has life, and the water gives life.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: Absolutely. And you can see how William Pye, who designed this, he's a water sculptor by tradition. He approaches the design of this font very carefully. You can see, not only has he thought about the inscriptions to include, but also he's looked back to the early traditions of baptismal fonts. Of course, in that early Christian tradition, it was a baptism of full immersion. Of course, that's still practiced today, but more often, we see infant baptisms, a baptism by affusion. That, of course, is when the priest takes up water, sometimes with his hand or a little cup or a shell, and pours it over the child's head. It's referring back to this very early tradition in the church, isn't it?
BEN QUASH: Just by its sheer size. That's right. And also its shape. It's in the shape of a cross. It's cruciform. This is fundamentally important, as well, because what Christians believe is that when they are baptised, they are united with Christ in his death, and also in what lies beyond his death, which is his resurrection. The inscriptions, as you say, pick up exactly on these themes. This one says, "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you." God guaranteeing safe passage, if you like, through death to a safe arrival on the other side.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: Part of that passage through the waters, surely, is about that ritual cleansing as well, both literal and symbolic?
BEN QUASH: Washing. It's the symbol also of washing, and the washing away of sin, which is a very important continuity with the baptism of John the Baptist. Of course, he wasn't offering a baptism of union with Christ, because Christ hadn't yet died or been risen, but he was offering a baptism of purification, of washing away sins. That is a hugely important aspect of the language that's used in the liturgy of baptism.
There are many symbols in the liturgy. Water is the central element. It's fascinating that we owe that to John the Baptist himself. In many traditional forms of baptism, oil was used to anoint, and in some cases still is. The dressing in new clothes, white clothes, to symbolise the purified state. Giving a name is something that happens at a baptism, a name to the child, but also using the name of God, the Trinitarian name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: I baptise thee in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost.
BEN QUASH: Absolutely. That's essential. One last, very important element is the giving of a lighted candle. That, too, symbolises transition from darkness, the darkness of sin, to light, the realm of new existence, purified existence.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: That's very interesting. When I hear you talk about light and dark, it strikes me that that's something that artists often pick up on and use it as part of their visual language. I'm thinking in particular of the National Gallery's painting by Adam Elsheimer, who really uses that dramatic contrast of light and dark to make a lot of the points that you were just describing.
Before we go back to the National Gallery, we should have a little wander around.
BEN QUASH: It would be unjust not to.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: Ben, this is the painting I was thinking about when we were in Salisbury Cathedral and you were talking about light and dark. It’s Adam Elsheimer’s, he’s a German artist, it’s his painting on copper of the baptism of Christ by John. It was painted in about 1599. And the reason I thought of it is particularly, do you see this foreground figure cast in shadow and the way that is sort of playing off of the figures in the light behind him? So it seems that this figure, who seems to be undoing his sandals, is preparing himself for baptism. Behind him you actually have the figure of John in the act of baptising Christ. He’s the one who’s bending over here. Can you see just the key moments are picked out in light, notably John the Baptist’s hand with the trickle of water there? And that play of light and dark reminds me of aspects of the baptismal ritual.
BEN QUASH: I bet a Christian looking at this image would have identified this dark figure and perhaps the one behind who seems to have been baptised and is in the light as representing their own Christian transition from darkness to light.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: What Elsheimer’s particularly known also for is his landscapes. You see this beautiful, very German-looking, lush forest landscape. And I’m always delighted by the inclusion of this waterfall that seems so closely associated with John the Baptist. You see it seems to almost be falling on his head.
BEN QUASH: It’s true, a cascade there and then another cascade from his hand to Christ. That’s beautiful.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: Isn’t it?
BEN QUASH: It seems to me that the whole picture, the separating of light and dark, the highlighting of light and the emphasis on shade and contrast to light, has an element of judgment. Even in some ways in anticipation of the Last Judgment. There’s other things in the picture, too, that speak of that: the heavens opening, Heaven shining down through this gap in the clouds and bringing out where there’s good, where there’s bad, where there’s light and where there’s dark.
And even talking of details, the tiny, tiny, figures, you can barely see them up on the hillside at the top left. They seem to me to be among these various felled trees, again sort of a symbol of judgment that John used in his preaching. He said that the axe is laid to the root of the trees, the unworthy trees, which will be cut down and destroyed.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: Yes, and as you described that kind of rending of the skies, I love how these putti are encircling their arms and creating what I always think of as kind of a celestial architecture, they become like cupola or a lantern allowing that beam of light to enter. It’s extraordinary that Elsheimer can include so much in this tiny little copper, which I think must have been used in a domestic interior. This is a small work that requires this close look at it and examination
BEN QUASH: You’ve got to get near it.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: It provides a very nice contrast with a painting we have here, the same subject, that Piero della Francesca ‘Baptism’ that we looked at in the introduction. If you think about the idea that they’re representing the same subject but in a very different visual language, I think that that language has to do with northern artists and Italian artists but also for the very function of the image. This one for a domestic interior for quiet, individual contemplation perhaps and the other as an altarpiece that would be inviting congregations and that would be visible from a great distance. So perhaps we should revisit the Piero and have another look?
JENNIFER SLIWKA: Ben, this is Piero della Francesca's altarpiece that was painted for the Camaldolese abbey in Borgo Sansepolcro, this little town in Tuscany. Unlike the tiny little Elsheimer that we just looked at, you can see already the scale of this picture. It's meant to be read from a distance. And the visual language is entirely different from what we saw in Elsheimer.
BEN QUASH: Curiously the architecture of the gallery gives us a little bit of a sense of it having it’s own space and its own chapel, almost a sort of chapel, isn't it?
JENNIFER SLIWKA: Precisely, and actually, this room in the National Gallery was designed specifically for this artwork, so that you would be able to approach it in a sort of quiet, more contemplative mode.
BEN QUASH: There's a beautifully contemplative atmosphere, isn't it? The stillness of these floating clouds and the sense that the dove, which represents the Holy Spirit, is almost like one of those clouds, just poised, incredibly still, directly above Christ's head.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: Almost perspectivally of course that dove seems to be flying out into our space. Piero is known as an absolute master of perspective, and he was very interested in science and in optics. And what you actually see here, and this confuses a lot of people, I think, including our students, but it looks like you can see the pebbles of the riverbed, and that actually, Christ is not standing in the water. What seems to be represented, in fact, is that we the beholder are standing in the riverbed as well. And you know, when you approach a river, if you look directly down, you can see the pebbles and let's say the fish at the bottom of the river, but if -
BEN QUASH: If the angle's right, yes.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: Precisely, but if you look at a distance, you might well see something like this: the reflections of the clouds, and it seems that Piero has beautifully evoked that in his Baptism.
BEN QUASH: And Christ's feet and the Baptist’s feet are placed at exactly the point where our vision shifts, from seeing through the water to seeing just onto the surface, which feels to me like a wonderful metaphor for how you might always see more; I mean, in this scene, there are many mysteries.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: The kind of difference between literal seeing and figurative or metaphorical or spiritual seeing. It's like Piero's riffing on that.
BEN QUASH: it's odd that Christ is baptised in Christian tradition because he is sinless, so he doesn't need to be baptised, and John actually says that, "I shouldn't be baptising you; you ought to baptise me." It remains something of a mystery in Christian tradition, but it's often been thought that the main purpose of it is to show his total solidarity with humanity.
JENNIFER SLIWKA: But of course, there're different kinds of baptism, and in this one, yes, we see John's baptism of Christ, but John himself undergoes a sort of baptism, doesn't he? Of a different kind.
BEN QUASH: He does. Not Christian baptism, as such, as in the Sacrament, but he, at the end of his life, will be martyred. And martyrdom was viewed by the early church as equivalent of baptism, or indeed, another kind of baptism; baptism in blood. That, I think, is what we're going to look at in our next episode, isn't it?
JENNIFER SLIWKA: Yes, we're going to focus on John's martyrdom.
