Did you know? .. why does Christ look so unfamiliar here — neither infant nor man?
Simone Martini, Christ Discovered in the Temple, 1342. Signed and dated on the frame; painted in Avignon at the papal court. Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool.
Because the Gospels give painters almost nothing here. Only Luke tells one story from between Christ's infancy and his adult life: at twelve, Jesus stays behind in the Temple in Jerusalem to argue with the scholars, and his parents search three days before they find him. Simone Martini painted it as a family scene — a boy with folded arms, a mother's reproach written in Latin on her book: "Son, why have you dealt with us like this?" Between the Madonnas and the Passion, this is the only relevant and original Italian gold-ground painting showing Christ who is neither a child nor a man.
The panel is in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, part of National Museums Liverpool (inv. WAG 2787). It is egg tempera and gold leaf on panel, about 49.5 × 35 cm — small enough to hold, and made to be looked at closely by one person rather than a congregation.
The original frame bears Simone Martini's signature and the precise date: 1342 ("Simone of Siena painted me in the year of Our Lord 1342"). This confirms it was painted while he was working at the Papal Court in Avignon, France.
Why it is in England at all
Its early history is lost; nothing is documented before it surfaced in an English sale in 1804. It was bought at that Christie's sale by William Roscoe, the Liverpool lawyer, banker, botanist, historian and abolitionist politician, reportedly for five guineas, and passed to the Liverpool Royal Institution in 1819. Roscoe was one of the first British collectors to take early Italian painting seriously at a time when the period was still dismissed as primitive; when his finances collapsed in 1816 his pictures were sold, and friends secured much of the collection for the city. The Royal Institution transferred the panel to the Walker in 1948. Five guineas in 1804 bought what is arguably the most important Trecento panel in Britain.
Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
