A PORTRAIT OF MAN’S JUDGEMENT

 

In the early days, when painting and sculpture of holy images became a popular trade, a painter, from a city on the River Adige in the Adriatic region of northeastern Italy, was known for his unique art as he aspired to become the likes of Thomas Benton, Amedeo Modigliano, Chaim Soutine, Claude Monet, kazimir Malevich, and other great artists before him. His ambition was more in the line of a Portraitist as he fared well in his painting. 

At a certain time, he decided to embark on an onerous task of producing a portrait to be reckoned with and that task was to be a portrait of Jesus with the twelve disciples at the last supper which he termed “Portrait of the Lord’s Last Supper.” His focus and challenge were to portray the exact pictures of the Lord and the twelve disciples. For this, he travelled to the city of Jerusalem and there began his work. For two years, he traversed the city and outlined towns for motivation and in search of someone who bore a semblance to the one he was to paint in his portrait. He had painted the Lord first whose likeness was hard to find. And he had painted eleven disciples after but just one disciple left, Judas Iscariot. The work and his other engagements had taken him two years. So, he walked the streets and towns beginning from the ones he had not been to the ones he began with in search of that someone, of his own description and imagination, that bore the likeness of Judas to finish his work. 

He at last found a man and began painting him as Judas. He kept saying to himself how the man truly bore a likeness to Judas. All the while too, the man was quiet and wondering until the painter was done. The man then said to the painter, “Sir, you have painted me before. Why paint me again?” The painter looked up at him and said, “No, I have not painted you before.” The man replied, “Yes, sir, you have. Remember, almost two years ago, you found me and took me in to be painted as the Lord Jesus Christ on this same portrait. There, that is me amidst the disciples as the Lord of the supper. Why paint me now again as Judas Iscariot?” The painter looked up at the man closely and recognized him. The man he was painting as Judas, he had previously painted him as Jesus.