Images of Christ: Christ in the House of Martha and Mary

Rowena Loverance reflects on a painting by Johannes Vermeer

Before Christmas I was lucky enough to see, in Edinburgh, Johannes Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Martha and Mary in the Scottish National Gallery. It confirmed to me the idea of this series. My choices, in selecting twelve images of Christ, are bound to be personal, so where better to start than with Jesus’ encounter with two women – and two strong-minded women at that. The story of Martha and Mary, the sisters of Bethany, appears in Luke’s gospel (10:38-42) immediately after the parable of the Good Samaritan. Maybe this, too, is part of the answer to the question that was posed to Jesus: ‘Who is my neighbour?’ Is the more neighbourly act to sit and listen to this visiting preacher, who has unexpectedly dropped by, or to set about putting a meal on the table?

Jesus gives us one answer – but what is Vermeer’s? It seems to me that in this painting he is subtly undercutting the gospel text. Jesus is pointing to Mary, certainly, but it’s Martha with whom he is making eye contact – and we know from x-rays that Vermeer altered the position of Christ’s head to make the angle more oblique. It is Martha – or to be exact the bread that she is proffering, which no doubt she’s just made – who occupies the centre of the frame.

2017 is the 500th year since the Lutheran Reformation and the great ‘faith versus works’ debate still rumbles on. It seems, in this picture, that Vermeer is definitely getting one in on the ‘works’ side.

Another good reason for starting with this picture is that Vermeer painted it around 1654-6, so it’s been around almost exactly as long as our Religious Society. It is thought to be his earliest known work, and his only biblical one. It’s a familiar enough theme – artists seized on the domestic setting and the possibilities it offered for still life; just think of the delight Diego Velázquez took in foregrounding his slithery fish scales and cloves of garlic in his treatment of the story (National Gallery, London). But Vermeer eschews the still life route – for comparison, just look at his vastly more detailed treatment of the basket and loaf of bread five years later in the Milkmaid (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). Apart from the carpet, that is – he just wouldn’t be Vermeer if he didn’t go into detail over the carpet. But otherwise the painting is entirely focused on the three figures, giving them remarkably equal weight. It reminds me, inescapably, of that famous Trinity icon of Andrei Rublev; there, too, three figures sit around a table covered with a white cloth and bearing a single dish.

It’s impossible to look at this picture, of course, without thinking of the next time these three meet in the pages of the Bible, that great scene in John (11:1-44) when both of the sisters upbraid Jesus: ‘If you had been here, our brother would not have died’. This is itself followed by Martha’s assertion of faith in Jesus: ‘Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, he who is coming into the world’. In giving us Martha, in her rolled-up sleeves and Eucharistic pose, surely this is exactly what Vermeer intends us to think.

Rowena is arts correspondent of the Friend.

Further information: https://art.nationalgalleries.org/

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