My Catholic friend has written papers, only one of which I have read, about how he came across this picture. He would not exclude the possibility that it was painted by none other than the evangelist Luke. No laboratory analysis of the wood has been performed to date. The nuns are reluctant, he writes, because it’s so brittle. But, even so, the art historians have declared the painting definitely ancient, probably first century. Ageless, the Virgin looked upon me, too.

My friend drove me to the convent, located in an ordinary residential street on Monte Mario, across the Tiber near the Hilton, and asked for the key at a little hatch in the side wall while I waited in the car. Before he led me to the chapel, where the nuns had turned the picture around for us, he peed in the bushes beside the iron gate. Ordinarily the Virgin looks into the oratorium of the nuns, who have cloistered themselves away for life, neither receiving visitors nor travelling, nor even leaving the convent to walk to the shops. God suffices.

We saw a few of them through the barred window in which the picture is hung, and we heard all of them praying in the wan light, wimples past their chins, starched white habits, black veils. Five of the thirteen sisters are over eighty. Those sitting in the section of the pew that I could see through the window were no younger. Vast water stains stood out on the bare walls of their baroque church. My friend said the pipes were rotting, the phones didn’t work, and repairs were out of the question until the convent had paid off its debts. The plea for donations is the part of their prayers which has yet to be fulfilled.

After a few minutes the nuns put out the light, after which we could only hear their voices: one verse low, one verse high, a singsong interspersed with pauses, although I couldn’t make out a word. My friend’s book begins with a quotation from the retired pope: what it says is nothing new but always needs to be said anew. ‘Great things do not get boring with repetition. Only petty things call for variety and need to be changed quickly for something else. What is great grows greater still when we repeat it, and we grow richer, and become calm, and free.’ In Rome I was already growing envious of Christianity, envious of a pope who said sentences like that, and, if I hadn’t thought the idea of God’s incarnation in only one person fundamentally wrong and the world of Catholic concepts in particular so pagan, if I hadn’t felt such a revulsion against the order that places all people and all human relations in hierarchies and against the demonstration of power in every Catholic church, not to mention the idolization of suffering to the point of bloodlust, I might possibly have gradually adopted its practices, attended the Latin Mass, and joined, with interspersed pauses, in the singsong, although initially more for aesthetic reasons, perhaps, and out of a fascination with the unparalleled continuity of an institution that forms the people of God into a community. It is the only one to have achieved that for so long. Who knows? Maybe the miracle that produced this most sumptuous of all heavenly houses might one day have manifested itself to me too. As it is, while I continue to consider that this possibility is not reality, I acknowledge – and what’s more, I feel – that Christianity is a possibility.

As if the darkness were not seclusion enough, invisible hands closed the shutters from inside so that we now saw only the icon, not the room behind it. Nothing is extant but Mary’s face in the most astounding colours, the edge of her veil, two gilt hands, which could be pointing a way or signalling aversion, and the cross at the position of her heart – nothing else but her silhouette. And of course the gold background! The icon painters call it ‘light’, my friend whispers, because the gold surrounds the saints like the light of Heaven. There is no side lighting, no imagined light source; instead, the colours themselves are light, and the lightest of them is the gold. As my friend withdrew to say a rosary, I had some time with the Virgin. But why do I call her Virgin if I don’t believe in her as the Mother of God? One word: touched. God has touched her. That is both grace and torment; it raises up and strikes down; it is both a caress and the blow of a hammer. All is lost and God suffices.

Her big brown eyes look at you as if her much smaller mouth had cried at first, like the mystic Hallaj, ‘Save me, people; save me from God.’ And so she did at first; she cried for help when she found out, I’m certain she did. ‘Glad tidings!’ the kings bellowed, bringing gifts, but I am certain she was anything but glad. She carried it, bore it, as the saints bear it; that’s what made her one – not being chosen, but being able to stand it. Having become an enemy of the state overnight, she fled, sleeping in barns, in cellars, and in the wilderness if necessary, which was a real wilderness two thousand years ago, her child always with her, and always her care, which was not increased or diminished by the question whether he was a or the son of God. Her care was that of every mother. Later she stood by as they struck him in the face, drove him with whips through the spitting mob, saw the thorns piercing deep into his brow, saw him carrying the cross, saw them nail him to it, saw the cross erected and the people jeering, saw her son hanging upon it, bleeding, groaning, thirsting, crying out in pain and despair hour after hour. Perhaps he was not the only one to look towards Heaven and ask why God had forsaken him. Certainly the son looked down from the height at which the people displayed him towards his mother. Does the painting show her before or after that?

No doubt there is a rule of icon painting that answers my question. My Catholic friend writes, as if it went without saying, that these eyes had seen how the son, her son, was tortured to death an arm’s length away from her. Yet the Virgin doesn’t look old enough to be mourning a grown-up child. For that matter, with the thin bridge of her nose, as if it was pulled taut, and her big, almost spherical cheeks, she is quite beautiful – not a Roman whore like Caravaggio’s or a French countess like Raphael’s, but undoubtedly Oriental. No, she is still young, and yet she has already experienced what it means to be touched, struck, by God; at least she believes she has experienced it; she has felt the pain, and she senses – more: she knows – that the pain will grow beyond measure. Only the immeasurable itself is beyond this Virgin’s experience. If that were depicted here, this would no longer be an icon. People would run from it in terror. The miracle of the Catholic Church, if it is one, would be that they don’t: they do not run away. For reasons I can’t understand, they celebrate precisely what is most repulsive – which, I admit, may be what is most true – whether out of sadism, if one were to interpret it maliciously, or out of realism, as we may hope is the case. Yet Mary alone the Catholics keep pure, and I understand that perfectly. They paint madonnas for consolation, because without consolation you can’t go on; they paint pictures of an immaculate face. Virgin, to me, means exactly this: pure – and hence, in the language of immanence, purified – of all experience.

The boy is ugly. He is much uglier than he looks in this picture, or in any of the others that I have found on the Internet or taken myself with the good camera I borrowed. Clicking from one photo to the next, I would even go so far as to say that the boy is downright photogenic, when I remember how ugly he really looks. His mouth, for example, that open mouth: his receding lower and protruding upper jaw; and the lips more so: the lower lip short, or, more precisely, not short, but pressed, extruded into two fat bulges, accompanied by an upper lip pulled upwards like a tent on two strings, spreading out sideways to shelter the corners of the mouth. Because each picture captures only one point of view, they give no more than an inkling of how stupid the boy looks with his gaping lips – really stupid, more than just unbecoming: dimwitted, a mean kind of dimwit with something awkward and boorish about him at the same time, something of a spoiled brat thinking only of himself. It is unpleasant, unsavoury no less, to imagine a kiss, no matter how readily and easily we receive kisses from other children – but from him? There are children like that, five-year-olds who still scratch blithely in their unwiped bum crease and hold out their shit to you. This one has only lost some paint, but precisely on the three fingers that he holds up in blessing, and from the tip of his fingernails past the second knuckle. At first glance he seems about to stick his bent, brown fingers down your throat.

And how round he is – not fat in the sense of overweight, but rounded, his nose wider than it is long, his skin rotund like blown-up balloons. His cheeks look all the more spherical because the retracted lower lip lifts up his ball-shaped chin. In all, his face consists of three – no, four – no, five balls, because his double chin and the tip of his nose are also globular, but the spherical shape of his exaggerated bulk is what you can’t see if you look at the boy from a single point of view, that is, in only two dimensions. The two breasts are likewise round, like a woman’s, I notice looking at photos of the boy, and the fat encircles his upper and lower arms, forming more balls. A cherub, a mother would call him, believing her child the most beautiful on earth even if he is a paragon of hideousness to anyone else, especially an unbeliever or a believer in a different faith like me. My Catholic friend, whom I asked to go by the Bode Museum on his next visit to Berlin because, in the photos I had sent him, the boy’s stupidity is only twodimensional, my friend too conceded on the phone that the last thing he would associate with the boy was beauty, grace, charm.

‘Did you see his fingers?’

‘I’m standing right in front of him,’ my friend whispered.

He had no trouble finding the boy; he just asked the first guard he saw where to find the ugly Christ Child and was shown the way with a grin. All the guards knew it: Fatty is down the corridor to the hall under the smaller cupola, then first door on the left. In the catalogue, meanwhile, there is no illustration of the Christ Child, and even the special catalogue of the sculpture collection contains only a small, almost tiny photo, flatteringly lighted, as if the museum’s directors were ashamed of it or did not want to cause any trouble by a kind of blasphemy. Although blasphemy no longer bothers anyone in Berlin, except perhaps some of the Turks. But this boy, and this is the important thing to understand, praises the Father.

The motif of Jesus as a child did not appear in Catholic art until the thirteenth century, my friend digresses, so the sculpture must be a very early, immature specimen. St Francis in particular loved the Christ Child, he explains, and female mystics cherished Him in contemplation and rocked Him in their arms, feeling themselves one with the Mother of God.

‘That snotface?’ I ask.

‘Well,’ my friend whispers. The sculptor of this particular piece, he supposes, which is perhaps less propitious to unio mystica, immortalized the features, and probably the dense curls, of his patron, or his patron’s child.

‘Aha,’ I say, just to say something in reply to his explanation, which doesn’t entirely satisfy me.

But my friend begs to be excused, he has to hang up, he just wanted to let me know. ‘Look it up in Ratzinger,’ he follows up in a text message. ‘I’ve read it,’ I answer.

I would rather have asked my friend more about St Francis, who didn’t mind the Son’s ugliness perhaps because he cherished every child, ugly or beautiful, as a child of God. Be that as it may, the retired pope, whom my friend esteems more highly than he does Pope Francis I, has not written a book about Jesus’ childhood. The years of Jesus’ childhood, when he was no longer an infant and not yet a youth, are omitted from the Infancy Narratives. Benedict XVI describes the annunciation of the birth, the birth itself, the visit of the three wise men, and the flight into Egypt – Jesus was still a baby then. Benedict XVI then continues the story only when Jesus is nearing adolescence. And in the meantime? He must know, the retired pope, that there are indications: the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Although it was not included in the canon, Christians gave it consideration as a testimony for many centuries.

Without entering into the philological controversy, I always found the Infancy Gospel to be a very realistic text. Precisely because it is disturbing, because it deviates very unfavourably from the notion we form, believing or unbelieving, of the adult Jesus, its conservation and propagation among Christianity would be plausible only by means of a particularly strong chain of transmission. For I never found the Infancy Gospel to be logically consistent, of a piece, with the beloved infant and the so fiercely loving later man. Playing on the bank of a stream, for example – and this is the bang that opens the book – the five-year-old diverts its rushing waters into little puddles by the sheer power of his will. A neighbour boy takes a willow switch and sweeps the water back into the stream. The two quarrel, and up to here it reads like a normal story: a scene between two boys that could happen in any kindergarten. But then Jesus cries out that the neighbour boy should wither up like a dead tree, never to bear leaves or roots or fruit again. And immediately the neighbour boy withers up completely, which can only mean he dies, he dies a wretched death, plunging his parents into sorrow, as the Infancy Gospel explicitly says. Jesus, unmoved, goes home.

And the account continues, in exactly that style, with those character traits: in the village, a boy running accidentally bumps Jesus’ shoulder. What does Jesus do? Kills the boy with a single word. And when the parents of this and the other boy, and more and more people, complain to Joseph – what does Jesus do? Strikes them all blind. And when his knowledge exceeds that of his teacher Zachaeus, he makes a laughing stock of the old man in front of everyone; Zachaeus despairs and wants to die on account of this child, who must be a paragon of hideousness.

Perhaps Benedict XVI, and my Catholic friend along with him, are too spellbound by the beauty they seem to find so important in Christianity, and hence in Jesus Christ, to see the ugliness as well. I understand their persistence; in a city like Berlin I need only attend a simple Sunday service to concur with them that beauty is sorely lacking in Christianity today. Poverty alone can’t make a God great. But beauty can only be realized together with its opposite. Jesus himself said, or is said to have said, in a saying transmitted by the Church Father Hippolytus, ‘He who seeks me will find me in children from seven years old.’ That would seem to mean that the Saviour is not to be found in the five-year-old that the Infancy Gospel describes. It means that even the Son must first become that which, in the canonical tradition, he is from the beginning. Jesus may have been a snotface, a monster of a child, one who possessed miraculous powers yet used them with malice. I am afraid some will think I am now blaspheming against Jesus himself. But it is no blasphemy, and malice is an attribute that is ascribed to God too.

Clicking from one picture to the next, I wonder whether it was not by remembering with shame the loveless child he had been that Jesus became filled with love, ultimately an ecstatic, enthusiastic, understanding man who emphasized the good even in a felon, who praised beauty even in what is ugly. This anecdote is a favourite of the Sufis, and also the one I love best: Jesus and his disciples come across a dead, half-decayed dog, lying with its mouth open. ‘How horribly it stinks,’ say the disciples, turning aside in disgust. But Jesus says, ‘See how splendidly its teeth shine!’ Jesus might have been speaking not only of the dog but also of the child he used to be.

But the mother – you couldn’t wish it on any mother to have such a son: announced by angels, exalted by kings, and then he turns out to be a spoiled brat brimming with supernatural power. The Infancy Gospel mentions Mary only at the very end, when Jesus is more than seven years old. She must have agonized over him, felt ashamed of his misdeeds, and yet stood by him, loving her cherub unconditionally. That is his mother, the epitome of the mother: no matter how the child is. That is her son, every son, who has to learn love from his mother. I wouldn’t want to cradle this boy in my arms.

As a youth I often dreamt that Jesus appeared today, here in Cologne, at the train station or at H&M, and in every dream I saw a freak, probably homeless, or a hippie holdover with long, unkempt hair, his shirt and trousers of motley rags, and on his bare feet, even in winter, the sandals that are often referred to by his name. A misfit, a nutcase, he stood in a pedestrian zone warning that the end of the world was near, or else he was a political rabble-rouser, a fanatic in his contemporaries’ eyes, although peaceful and therefore harmless, more ridiculous than dangerous. I assume such dreams, as miniatures or caricatures of the uniform non-conformity of my political socialization in West Germany, reveal more about my time than about Jesus. The Jesus I dreamt about could just as easily have been mistaken for a tramp as for a founding member of the Green Party.

Later I realized that Jesus was not particularly obtrusive in his outward appearance. John the Baptist was conspicuous, as were later the early Christian hermits. Jesus himself was so fond of eating and drinking that his feasts were held against him. Without supporting their accusations, we must take seriously what his adversaries said: after all, they could as easily have decried him as a liar or a thief, but instead they cried, ‘Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners’ (Matthew 11: 19). In other words, they accused Jesus of holding banquets for the godless and the collaborators with the Roman occupation. I don’t think he sympathized with them. More probably, he wanted to demonstrate community with all members of his people – not just the dignitaries and the orthodoxy, not just the outcasts and the disadvantaged, no: all of them, even the narrow-minded and the lawbreakers, those of little imagination or character – with us. Seen in that way, Jesus was the very opposite of a misfit; he was gregarious in the extreme.

In Veronese’s painting, Jesus is feasting among all the people, his mother beside him, the Apostles Peter, Andrew, Philip and, with the knife in his hand, Bartholomew of Cana, who will later be flayed alive, as well as cooks, waiters, butlers, musicians, the maître de table with his oriental turban and, evidently very genteel in his gold brocade gown, the wine steward. All the garments, for that matter: not historical, but contemporary with the painter, from the sixteenth century, for which reason it was long a popular pastime to try to identify all kinds of contemporaries with the various wedding guests, from Veronese himself, and a few of his fellow artists, to church officials, to heads of state such as Queen Mary of England and Suleiman the Magnificent. Perhaps, art historians answer sympathetically, but perhaps not.

The individuals are not what counts. What counts are the numbers: Veronese has positioned a hundred and thirty people in The Wedding Feast at Cana and given them a hundred and thirty different faces, gestures and expressions, so that the viewer’s gaze gets delightfully lost in the details and constellations, in the architecture and the countless props on this stage of humanity. As I stand before this huge picture, almost 70 square metres in area, the same thing happens that would most likely happen if Jesus were to appear today: I pay him no more mind than anyone else. He sits in the centre, true, and is illuminated by a little halo, like his mother, but what is that halo against the dazzling splendour and abundance all around? Apart from the disciples, the other guests pay him no mind at all; they sit still, talk, cook, serve, play music as if there was nothing out of the ordinary. That is all the more painful since they, or at least some of them – the wine steward, the butler, the black boy at the left, the first guests at either end of the table, even one of the dogs – have already noticed the miracle. But no one looks at Jesus, who turns water into wine. And accordingly no one suspects whose flesh they will eat. It is lamb, as we can see from the platter being carried into the scene by two servants at the upper right. And it is being cut into plate-sized portions directly above Jesus’ head.

Maybe my dreams had it right, except that they connected Jesus’ differentness and strangeness to superficialities, his clothes, his hair. In the Gospels too he belongs to a different present, a second here and now so to speak: he is on earth, he is feasting with everyone, he is not outwardly conspicuous – and yet he is touched so deep inside, penetrated by God, that he glows, even if only the disciples, artists and children from seven years old on can see it. What distinguishes him is so subtle that not even Mary Magdalene recognized the resurrected Jesus at first sight, not even the disciples who ate with him at Emmaus. It is not his eyes, not his voice, and it cannot be his words if he so often says nothing. Perhaps it is nothing more than a look – all the other 129 wedding guests are looking at one thing or another; not all of them are absorbed in conversation, many are still, more than at any ordinary wedding; many are thinking, as if they had noticed the light after all, or at least been disturbed by something. But Jesus is looking at nothing, and thus at everything. The difference is more distinct if you compare his gaze with that of his mother, who also looks absent. Only her gaze, which is also slightly lowered, is directed inward, where she is grieving, because with the first miracle she foresees the martyrdom that awaits her son. Jesus on the other hand is looking outward, out of his present place and time. He is looking at none other than you.

And anyway, who takes their mother to a wedding? A young, well-built man like Jesus goes with a girl, or, if he hasn’t got a girl, he goes to meet one. Just looking at his mother’s appearance, you can see she’s a wet blanket: never budging from her son’s side, wearing the traditional mourning colours black, blue and grey, where others only wanted to enjoy the feast. In my time, that would have been the odd thing, the absolutely strange and segregating thing: that he always had his mother along – and she’s even called sponsa Christi, the bride of Christ – his mother! That’s probably why we in West Germany were at such pains to portray him as having a relationship with Mary Magdalene: to make his non-conformity conform just a little bit – although the Gospels contain nothing to suggest any erotic connection. At most, one might hear Mary Magdalene’s complaint as implying she is in love with the young man. For his part, however, Jesus never says a word to the woman that indicates love for her. Jesus was solitary. For all his gregariousness, amid 129 wedding guests, Jesus was solitary. At most, he was with his mother. And, what is more, he demanded solitude of each individual in his community. ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple’ (Luke 14: 26). There is no character trait that permeates all four Gospels as distinctly as his insistence on being free of all relationships, free not only of relations, friendships and loves but also of all things, including houses and lands, as he explicitly adds in Matthew 19: 29.

It drove me mad that no one recognized him, that I could not persuade anyone of his presence, did not even try to persuade them since it seemed hopeless and I might have been taken for a madman myself, for one of the nutcases in the pedestrian area warning of the end of the world or chaining themselves to the doors of H&M in protest against starvation wages.

There’s no knowing whether Jesus’ eyes and mouth are opened wide in dismay or in suspense, whether his hand is upraised in defence or in command. There’s no knowing whether Mary’s amazement is ecstatic or in panic, whether her hand is reaching towards the open tomb or repulsing her brother. There’s no knowing whether Martha is really recoiling, silhouetted as she is in the lower left corner. There’s no knowing what is going through the minds of the three men, at the back perhaps the Apostle Peter, as they stare at the reawakened Lazarus. There’s no knowing whether Lazarus is laughing, however tiredly, or whether he is shouting, ‘No! I don’t want to.’ Rembrandt left that open; he did not interpret, much less evaluate. But he made the exertion visible, the spiritual and likewise the physical strain on Jesus, who does not merely speak an easy word, as the other painters have it, but rather calls into the tomb ‘with a loud voice’, which in the English of the King James Version means he screams or shouts; he ‘groaned in the spirit’ and was weeping a moment ago, and he foresees that the high priests will fear him now if they haven’t yet and will condemn him to death when they recognize his power. Rembrandt does not make the two sisters raise their hands to Heaven in devout gratitude; he has given Mary an expression of stunned amazement and Martha the hint of a cringe – no one here is happy, not even the three men, not even Peter. But most of all, Rembrandt breaks radically with his predecessors who painted Lazarus with a sound body. His Lazarus bears distinct traces of decay and a cadaverous green phosphorescence.

We have to realize that no one who believes in the resurrection of the dead would want to be reborn in this world. Jesus himself, who ‘loves’ Lazarus more than other people, is aware that he is not doing his deceased friend a favour by bringing him back to life. Jesus does it for his disciples – ‘to the intent ye may believe’ – and for the bystanders – ‘that they may believe’. From the very beginning, in fact, the moment the news arrives that Lazarus is sick, Jesus makes it clear that, at bottom, he must act for his own sake: ‘that the Son of God might be glorified’. For he correctly anticipates that Lazarus will die and his reawakening will be the provocation to crucify Jesus himself – after all, Jesus’ own resurrection is what is meant by ‘glorification’. This is consistent with Jesus’ view in which his trip to Bethany is a return to Jerusalem – ‘Let us go into Judaea again’ – which he associates with the course of time – ‘Are there not twelve hours in the day?’ – and Thomas urges the other disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.’ It is still more consistent with the weeping, Jesus’ quite remarkable, apparently passionate weeping in Bethany, which is often read as mourning for Lazarus – but why should Jesus mourn the death of the man he is about to reawaken? Thus Hippolytus and other Church Fathers interpret Jesus’ tears not as grief over the death of his friend but, on the contrary, as sorrow over his return to life. In other words, ‘Jesus wept’ because he had to oblige his friend, Lazarus whom he loved, to return to the misery of this world in order that Jesus himself could be killed and so be resurrected. And in fact, though it has received scant attention, there is a crucial pause during the raising of Lazarus as the tombstone is removed: ‘Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me,’ says Jesus on seeing the body. Only then does he call – or, rather, he screams and shouts Lazarus – ‘because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me’ – out of the tomb. That means his thanks for having been heard precede the physical resurrection; they are temporally and linguistically separate acts. So Jesus’ thanks seem to refer to something else. But to what?

I go back to the beginning of the story in John 11: ‘Our friend Lazarus sleepeth,’ Jesus says when he hears that Lazarus is sick in Bethany. ‘Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well,’ the disciples reply, thinking Jesus is talking about restful sleep. But Jesus explains to them that Lazarus has died: ‘I go, that I may awake him.’ Because we already know how the story ends, we assume that Jesus is announcing here that he will bring Lazarus back to earthly life. But the awakening could just as well refer to the resurrection. Jesus himself says to Martha, the sister of Lazarus, who has been dead and buried for four days, when she comes to meet him outside Bethany, ‘Thy brother shall rise again.’ That doesn’t surprise Martha: ‘I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day.’ And Jesus confirms Martha’s words: ‘I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’ Here he is clearly talking about eternal life – ‘though he were dead’ – not about continuing or resuming our temporally limited earthly existence. ‘Believest thou this?’ And in answer, the simple woman Martha, and not one of Jesus’ male disciples, speaks the new community’s confession: ‘Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.’ Jesus’ thanks for having been heard must refer to the ultimate, and ultimately eternal, resurrection. The subsequent physical reanimation of Lazarus is only the illustration that, through Jesus, the dead are resurrected; it is an outward sign for the unbelievers and the unsure, not for poor Lazarus by any means.

Or does Jesus weep because, when he arrives in Bethany, it has not yet occurred to him to bring Lazarus back to life, and therefore he actually misses his friend and does not expect to have him back so soon? ‘Behold how he loved him!’ say the Jews, sympathizing with Jesus in spite of their mistrust. But when a few of them provoke Jesus by reproaching him for not having prevented his friend’s death, he goes to the tomb and orders the stone removed. ‘Lord, by this time he stinketh,’ says Martha to deter him, ‘for he hath been dead four days.’ But Jesus admonishes Martha to have faith – in him, who is the resurrection and the life – and has the tomb opened. After Jesus has raised his eyes to Heaven and thanked God, he continues for the people’s sake, so that they will recognize that he is sent by God, and wakes the dead man. Lazarus rises from the tomb, his arms and legs bound in a shroud, his face bound with a napkin, no doubt for good reason. By omitting the napkin, Rembrandt supplies an explanation for Jesus’ odd reaction: instead of embracing or even greeting the friend he had mourned, Jesus only says, ‘Loose him, and let him go.’ – Go where?

Naturally we wonder, or maybe only I wonder, what kind of life it could be that Lazarus has just regained, with his skin already mouldering, his flesh shrunken or already maggoty, smelling of carrion and horrifying to everyone, not to mention the spiritual degradation, the shock of resting in the peace of the just, God’s peace, which is supposed to be eternal, and then suddenly being relegated back into the body, which by now is not just infirm, but rotten. And Jesus already knows that he will be killed, very soon and in the most ruthless way; he knows that Lazarus will then mourn him in turn; he will have Lazarus with him at the anointing that marks the beginning of the Passion – how can a friend subject a friend to that? Or does he subject him to it because Lazarus is his friend, just as a man might want to scream and shout the wife he mourns back to life, or a woman her husband, or parents their children – whether they believe in the resurrection or not? I too wish, and sometimes speak the admittedly egoistic wish, that I may die, God willing, before my wife and especially before our children, and not have to weep at their graves. But Jesus’ love surpasses human measure. How he loved Lazarus! There’s no knowing whether his friend is laughing, however tiredly, or whether he is shouting, ‘No! I don’t want to.’

Supposing you were unaware of the painting’s title, and you did not recognize the two figures, and so you took the halo for the rays of the hidden sun, suggesting the shape of a cross as they frame Christ’s head; supposing you saw just a man and a woman, both very young, the woman somewhat younger, but the man too no older than his early or at most his midtwenties, their brows unfurrowed, their cheeks rosy, their lips velvety like those of children and at the same time sensuously full; no aging apparent except in the slight suggestion of concavity below their eyes – what, then, would you think you were looking at? Although I was at an exhibition of El Greco, who had painted Jesus and Mary so often, and I had already read that this painting shows Christ taking leave of his mother, I thought I was looking at two lovers, or, to be more exact, at two people who love each other, and definitely not as mother and son. Their age is of course one factor in creating that impression: just past the threshold of adulthood, where painting, classical literature, and music too rightly situate great loves, for when we are younger we are too ignorant of what we are experiencing, and when we are older we are too quick to relativize it. But it is more than just their age: after all, the Mater Dolorosa is often portrayed as young, and sometimes younger than Christ. But, in El Greco’s painting, her motherhood is absent altogether; her gaze is directed not in sorrow or care at her son but, with an expression of serenity, into the distance, or at nothing. It is the look, so lost to herself, of one who feels safe with her beloved. And indeed he is looking at her with both desire and devotion. He is less a redeemer than a man who has found his redemption in love; his gaze is both ardent and adoring; it shows an almost comical languishing such as you would imagine in a Romeo or an Abelard, although you need only recall your own great love at that age.

The picture’s refutation of its own title could hardly be more blatant: the title refers to more than a mere leave-taking; it cites a high point of the Passion of Christ. According to the Bible, Jesus addresses Mary for the last time seconds before his death, calling down to her from the cross, ‘Woman, behold thy son!’ But the farewell to Mary in Bethany is one of the subjects from Jesus’ life that painters do not take from biblical sources. The representation is based on the medieval Meditations on the Life of Christ by the Pseudo-Bonaventure, who set the leave-taking earlier, between the raising of Lazarus and Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. To me as an outsider, that seems somewhat strange, since paintings by the same artists portray Mary in Jerusalem, and even on Golgotha, from the beginning to the end of the Way of the Cross. She is present when Jesus begins his doleful Way; she offers him her veil to cover his nakedness; she stands, supported by the other women, lamenting at the foot of the cross. But even in those paintings that set Christ’s leave-taking from his mother in Bethany, the home of Lazarus, and thus amid circumstances less dramatic than a crucifixion, the scene is still painful in the extreme – the last words between a mother and her son who is going to his certain death – especially as the popularization of the motif is connected with the emerging Marian mysticism, in which the Mother of God’s pain begins with the birth of her son, as in St Bridget of Sweden’s account: ‘When she wrapped him in swaddling clothes, her heart considered how his body was going to be wounded all over with sharp scourges, making it appear like that of a leper. When she bound her little Son’s hands and feet with swaddling bands, she called to mind how cruelly they would be pierced by iron nails on the cross.’ Accordingly, Mary is portrayed at her leave-taking in a bowed posture, often kneeling or, as Dürer depicts her, collapsed in grief, while Jesus tries in vain to console her, embracing her shoulder or holding her hands, speaking words of comfort. Indeed how could a son facing such an ordeal console his mother? In some pictures Jesus and Mary embrace; in others he kneels before her as she blesses him, or she holds him fast to stop him leaving. Almost all such pictures also show Lazarus’ sisters Mary and Martha, and many disciples, all of them weeping, lamenting, despairing. In El Greco, nothing of the kind – or, rather, the exact opposite.

The colours themselves are bright and warm; the luminous blue of the sky, the halo that could also be sunlight around Jesus’ head; likewise around Mary an opalescent nimbus that looks more like a friendly cloud; also the red and moss-green of their garments, the bright veil, the healthy glow of their foreheads, their cheeks, their lips. Moreover, the painting avoids all clues that might indicate a certain place, a certain station of the cross; El Greco only makes it plain that the two say their goodbyes outdoors, under a clear sky, although the scene could also be set in Heaven. But it is the eyes most of all that make me think of anything but the Passion, especially the woman’s eyes, in which there is more than just love: there is the bliss of its fulfilment. The man on the other hand – and this is the only touch of terror in the picture – seems to have a presentiment of the transience of all things, and especially of happiness – a certain what-if that overcomes a lover: if anything were to happen to her; if she were no longer there; if I ever had to live without her. Avicenna teaches, I once read, that melancholia has to do with two functions of the brain, cognition and imagination – that it is produced by simultaneously understanding what is present and imagining what is absent. Melancholic people enjoy summer even as, and in fact because, they think of winter; they see a thing and its transience simultaneously.

The man in the picture is not necessarily melancholic; a moment later he might look happy again. But in his eyes, it seems to me, the artist has captured the essence of melancholia. If it lasted longer than a moment, very much longer, if it were to remain fixed on his face, melancholia would destroy the very thing it fears for. Melancholia is not compatible with love because it inevitably evokes a feeling that one is not living but observing one’s own life, which is why Avicenna, and medieval medicine in general, treated it as an illness. As a moment, however, as that touch of terror, melancholia heightens your feeling just when you felt it was the highest possible. You step outside the present and are in it at the same time. What the man was about to say, I imagine, when he raised his index finger is the suggestion to look at things for a moment from outside – but, thinking better of it, he says nothing, lest she also perceive the transience of things.

And yet El Greco called the painting ‘Christ Taking Leave of His Mother’, and not something like ‘Romantic Idyll’; the light around Jesus’ head suggests a cross; the nimbus around Mary is certainly not a cloud. Is it not astonishing that there is no tradition concerning either of these two people, who loved as no one else, that tells of the love between a man and a woman? El Greco was astonished, it seems to me, when he painted their lips so sensuously that they seem likely to meet at any moment in a kiss. He added two pairs of eyes which are absent from the Gospels, but which everyone who remembers a great love must know.