Christ Blessing

Facing the viewer, Christ raises his right hand in a gesture of blessing. In his left hand he holds stone tablets inscribed with a passage from John 14:6: Ego sum via veritas vita , "I am the way and the truth and the life." This miniature was painted by an artist in the workshop of Jan van Eyck, one of the most influential painters of the northern Renaissance. Christ's facial type, the authority of the Lord's gaze, and the expressive breadth and weight of the mantel are particularly characteristic of van Eyck. Although Christ stands on a tiled floor that seems to recede, creating a shallow three-dimensional space, the background is composed of a flat, highly decorative checkered pattern. In the short prayer accompanying the image, the petitioner makes an unusually generous appeal to God to pardon his enemies. Below the text at the bottom of the page, two young men kneel before a lord. The prayer's message may have inspired the image, as the young men seem to lay down their arms and seek forgiveness. This page was removed from a famous medieval manuscript, the Turin-Milan Hours, which was begun for Jean, duke of Berry, and worked on sporadically over the course of the next fifty years by as many as ten artists.