The Boy Who Laughed at Death

The Boy who Laughed at Death Commentary by Gabriel Torretta, O.P. Bible Passage Images of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child are rarely what they seem at first glance. In 1455, Rogier van der Weyden transformed a simple nativity scene into a prophecy of the passion by hanging a crucifix on a pillar in the barn. Medieval images where the infant Jesus holds a goldfinch look charmingly pet-friendly until one realizes that the goldfinch legendarily acquired its red face-feathers from plucking the thorns out of the dead Christ’s head. An icon type associated with the fifteenth-century Cretan Andreas Ritzos shows Jesus clinging to the Virgin in a tender embrace, but the mood becomes ominous when the gaze turns to the angels who flank the scene, bearing the instruments of Christ’s torture and death. By contrast with these passion-cantered images, this anonymous fifteenth-century terracotta statue of Mary holding Jesus on her lap seems straightforward, even naturalistic. Mary is a happy young mother, who looks at her child with an easy smile on her face, and Jesus is a giggling, jolly infant, wholly without any of the conventional postures, gestures, or facial expressions that identify the Saviour in Christian art history. Yet, the carefree laughter that unites the two figures is a window that opens onto the widest theological horizon. Mary and Jesus’s laughter repeats the joy of Sarah, who proclaims that ‘God has made laughter for me; every one who hears will laugh over me’ (Genesis 21:6). This chortling Christ is another Isaac, the long-awaited child whose coming brings laughter because he himself is laughter, the joy of heaven dwelling in human flesh. But this blissful image does not sidestep the cross: the Isaac who climbs Mount Moriah bearing the wood on which he will be sacrificed (Genesis 22:6–8) is here, too. The fingers of Mary’s right hand stretch over her son’s leg to indicate his two natures, divine and human; and her thumb subtly gestures to Christ’s exposed genitalia, drawing the viewer’s attention to the life-giving generativity that comes not from procreation but from the blood first shed in the circumcision and then once for all on the cross. Sorrow and blood, laughter and life are united here with no remainder. In this child and in his coming passion, ‘God has made laughter’—and that laughter ‘was the light of the human race’ (John 1:4). References Bynum, Caroline Walker. 1991. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books), pp. 86–92