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Tissot - The Magi
Identifier
019322
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The Artist as Believer – Art, April 5, 2010 Issue by Karen Sue Smith
Tissot was bound by the beliefs of his time. His is a single, harmonized Gospel story, untroubled by the questions that modern biblical scholarship has raised and the contradictions it has pointed out. Mistakenly, he thought the culture of the Middle East had not changed much since the time of Jesus and so worked diligently to capture the similarity on paper before modernity could erase it. But this “mistake” accounts for some of the admirable documentary detail of his work: the patterns of rugs, tiles, lattices, textiles, capitals and costumes; and the precise rituals and pageantry, including the segregated society of men and women. Jesus walks through narrow passageways; sits in dark, moonlit rooms; strides down stone streets; and when not on the sea, traverses a pink, gold or blue landscape with oases of palms and olive trees that is starkly beautiful—its rock piles casting gray and mauve shadows. At times one also sees the Jerusalem of Tissot’s day—its red-and-white striped buildings bleached white in the gleaming sun.
A description of the experience
