Christ Sometimes Hungers in the Museum Also
Christ Sometimes Hungers in the Museum Also
Zachary Bartles
“Christ sometimes bleeds in the museum” — Patrick Kavanagh
For the one-hundred-and-fiftieth year anniversary of Ivan Kramskoi’s “Christ in the Desert”
Does Christ not sometimes hunger in the museum also?
Kramskoi thought so. Before his painting, every depiction
of the temptations in the desert was triumphant. Some works
Christ, after having rebuked Satan, or in the process of,
stood flatly haloed, often regaled in pure white sashed with bright red.
Kramskoi’s Jesus, however, wears an absolute robe-shaped,
sun-dereddened robe draped off his clavicles as from a clothes hanger,
and over that a dark, hem-tattered shawl. Stooped
like a Massgoer before Mass, he sits—hands overprayerfully clasped—
on a makeshift pew of rock. Hands clasped so hard
the bones in his left forearm show
like the dowels around which parchment is rolled,
exemplifying him who is both the Word and the scroll it is written on.
His sunken eyes fixate on the middlemost stone
foregrounded in the painting. The stone, tapered
like a pear, that appears to have been uprighted for the soul purpose
to be looked at, to be changed into bread. And look he does.
He has looked at the stone for one-hundred-and-fifty years
and will do so long as the painting lasts,
but he will never, not ever leaven it.
Zachary Bartles
Poet
Zachary was raised in the Shenandoah Valley of West Virginia. His work appears in the journals Appalachian Review and Ribbons, among others. He lives in East Texas with his wife, where he is a stay-at-home father to their daughter.
Painting by Ivan Kramskoi