Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Revisiting that Bellini

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch on a Thread, Chapter one
 I have finaly gotten around to looking up the iconography of the two Johns: that is Evangelist and Baptist.

John the Evangelist is typically represented with an eagle, sometimes with a cup with a  viper in it and  with a book meant to represent his Gospel.

John the Baptist is represented wearing rough clothing or skins, carrying a long cross in one hand and with either a lamb or with a text showing the words Agnus Dei (Lamb of God).

Knowing that, my earlier suspicions are confirmed: the guy on the left below is obviously John the Baptist. (Okay, it was more than a suspicion but I decided to check anyway, something Wikipedia obviously did not do.)



The image is courtesy of Wikipedia who label him incorrectly as John the Evangelist. As a rule, Wikipedia is always unreliable about controversial issues but this tells us they can get even what ought to be straightforward wrong.

Anyway, why should we care about which saint it is with regards to Brideshead. Well, maybe we shouldn't except that there is this interesting dialogue in this chapter. Julia has just asked Charles why he ever married Celia. He answers:
'Physical attraction. Ambition. Everyone agrees she's the ideal wife for a painter. Loneliness, missing Sebastian.'

'You loved him, didn't you/'

'Oh yes, he was the forerunner.'
Julia understood.
She did, did she? I think that is one of Waugh's weaker moments. It strikes me as a mind-bogglingly oafish thing for a man to say to a woman and I have a hard time imagining Julia understanding or accepting this. It could easily have been fixed too. All Waugh had to do was have Ryder tell us this thought directly.

In any case, the point I want to make here is that John the Baptist is, in Christian thought, the forerunner of Christ. When I Google "John the Baptist" and "Forerunner" I get 581 thousand hits as of December 21, 2010. (Check for yourself here.) He is the one who rises to prominence and then must diminish in order that Christ can increase. (There is a great sermon by Saint Augustine where he says that John's feast is on June 24, after which the days get shorter, diminish, until the feast of Christ's birth on December 25, after which they increase. He's off by a couple of days but it's a nice metaphor.)

In any case, the point is pretty straightforward: Sebastian is now cast in the role of the Baptist, in which case, Charles is wrong thinking Sebastian was the forerunner for Julia. He is the forerunner for someone just not Julia.

The remaining pictures here are the Annunciation over the top (which occurs in Luke's Gospel not John's), Saint Sebastian in the middle and Saint Anthony of the desert on the right. So, wouldn't it be just too weird if the next iteration we get of Sebastian turned out to be him living a monastic life in North Africa?

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

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