The Visual Commentary on Scripture featires 3 paintings that depict the scripture in three periods -early 1500 1671, and 1796. From VCS (Visual Commentary on Scripture). The link to the paintings and then the discussion.
The Feeding of the Five Thousand can be found in all four canonical Gospels (Matthew 14:13–21; Mark 6:32–44; Luke 9:10–17; John 6:1–15), and the Feeding of the Four Thousand in two (Mark 8:1–10; Matthew 15:29–39). The miracle emphasizes Christ’s caring concern and compassion, but also his hospitality and his generosity as a host.
In all three paintings in this exhibition, the central motif is Christ’s gesture of blessing and the baskets in which food will be distributed and leftovers collected. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo follows John’s version of the miracle, while Lambert Lombard’s interpretation is a more complex blending of narratives, and Francisco de Goya’s sources are less clear. Their approaches to the representation of the crowds are also different. Traditionally, Jesus’s followers are depicted either as a gathering of individuals whose diversity provides the painter with an opportunity to display his originality and skills, or as an undefined multitude.
Artists like Lombard suggest the breadth and universality of God’s message by showing its recipients as individuals of varying ages, genders, status, and ethnicities. In Murillo’s and Goya’s works, lack of definition turns these individuals into a mass, which evinces the magnitude of Christ’s following and the extent of his miraculous powers. Both Lombard and Murillo divide the crowd into small groups: Luke refers to ‘groups of about fifty each’ (9:14–15), while in the Gospel of Mark ‘they sat down in groups, by hundreds and by fifties’ (6:40). The wide sweep of Murillo’s landscape is populated by a large, expectant congregation, which in Goya’s interpretation becomes a barely sketched crowd agitated by a threatening, simmering sense of unrest.
Lambert Lombard – “The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes”. First half of 16th century.
Bartolome Estaban Murillo – The Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes”. 1671
Francisco de Goya – The Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes. 1795–96
