Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) was an Italian Renaissance painter best known for his Birth of Venus and Primavera as well as numerous religious-themed works. One of my favourite Substacks,
, by , recently profiled one of those, Madonna del Libro. The poem below, I hope, will be the first of a series (in no particular order) of short reflections on details from that painting, as well as perhaps others. My knowledge of Christian iconography is somewhat limited, so if any readers wish to chime in with their own perspectives in the comments, please do.Botticelli detail No. 1: three nails His small hands grip three nails, small golden nails, that He will hold always, feeling their sting in his palms to be reminded of who He is and who He is to be: Son of Man, forsaken And as He grows the golden nails will lengthen, to become three golden thorns, one for each hand that they may not heal one for His two feet that He may not tread the earth poised to receive the force that will pierce His flesh through, raise Him aloft and hold the whole weight of His body, that much less for the loss of His blood: a man forsaken.
Your poem enlivens the whole painting!
Oh my. So many connections. Coincidentally, i have been thinking deeply about this notion of the forsaken for a long while and especially this past 24 hours given the heart-breaking revelations of Andrea Robin Skinner about the sexual abuse she suffered and her mother's simply awful response. We will probably never know how Alice Munro made sense of her daughter's suffering such that she could seemingly display such an incredible lack of empathy (never mind compassion). But I have seen this exact type of lack up close more times than i care to enumerate. And it never hits me more devastatingly than when it is a mother who is the one who fails to defend their child. (So, one thing I see in Botticelli's painting is the child's gaze at his mother who is looking past him at the pages of the book. What is he asking for, holding the instruments of his destined torture, and what is she choosing to see that is more important?)
I read Ursula Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas when I was 16 (and it might have killed me had I not almost simultaneously discovered Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning). It is a story of the "forsaken" that Dostoevsky (with an obviously intentional reference to Jesus) wrote about and William James, absent christian theology, posed as a moral dilemma in one of his famous lectures. And this notion of "forsaken" or sacrifice is as old a story as that of Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22) and the Scapegoat (Leviticus 16). The old sacrificing the young is one of the oldest stories we know - whether codified in scripture, legislated in terms of sending (if not conscripting) the young for war, or practiced as part of the patriarchal violence against women (which, tragically, causes many women to act to perpetuate such - for diverse and complicated reasons).
Your attention to the three nails is brilliant. And i can't help but think about the way that abusers will resort to blaming the victim (child or otherwise) as having been responsible for the abuse - holding their own nails, as it were - as Munro's husband did with Andrea. Discovering the moral failings of our icons (if not loved ones) always challenges us to examine our own moral courage or lack of it. And there is so much to be done for which we need moral courage. Thanks for this poem.