I Am Your Brother, Joseph

+Attributed to Andrea Schavone, Joseph Judging His Brothers
Italian,  16th Century
Chambery, Musee des Beaux-Arts

This year the daily Mass readings for July 9th and 10th tell the Old Testament story of Joseph, he who was sold into slavery by his brothers, became a high ranking Egyptian official and eventually became reconciled to his family when they came to beg for food during a famine in Palestine. The climactic moment comes in the passages which form the reading for Thursday when, after testing them in previous passages, Joseph reveals his identity and tells his brothers

"I am your brother Joseph, whom you once sold into Egypt.
But now do not be distressed, and do not reproach yourselves for having sold me here. It was really for the sake of saving lives that God sent me here ahead of you.
For two years now the famine has been in the land, and for five more years tillage will yield no harvest.
God, therefore, sent me on ahead of you to ensure for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives in an extraordinary deliverance.
So it was not really you but God who had me come here; and he has made of me a father to Pharaoh, lord of all his household, and ruler over the whole land of Egypt.” (Genesis 45:5-8)


The story of Joseph is, of course, a familiar one. But, rather surprisingly, there are not as many depictions of the climactic scene in art as there are for the earlier episodes of his betrayal by his brothers, who sold him into slavery, and his rise in Egyptian society. Many focus on the incident in which he had to repulse the romantic advances of the wife of the Egyptian official Potiphar (Genesis 39). This is probably no surprise because tales of spicy advances have always been highly favored, and the reversal of usual roles in the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife makes for a nice variation on the usual formula.

While looking for images to illustrate the readings about Joseph and his reunion with his repentant family I couldn’t help but notice that, in addition to demonstrating, by their small numbers, that “sex sells” over family reconciliation, the images of Joseph and his brothers also illustrate an interesting development in western European art.

Images of Joseph as the high Egyptian official and in his meeting with his brothers seem to cluster in the later history of European art. And, within that cluster there is a difference between images made before 1800 and those made after 1800.

Images Before 1800

The earlier images tell a reasonably straightforward story, based on the biblical account.  They make little effort to set the incident in any particular time period or place.  The images are so lacking in special decorative motifs that they could even conceivably be read as records of recent history.

+Joseph Recognized By His Brothers
From the Psalter of St. Louis
Franch (Paris), c. 1270
Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France
MS Latin 10525, fol. 25v

* Joseph Forgiving His Brothers
From a Bible historiee
English, c. Late 13th-Mid 14th Century
Manchester, The John Rylands Library
MS French 5, fol. 39v

* Joseph Revealing Himself to His Brothers
From an Ancient History
Latin Kingdom (Acre), Last Quarter of the 13th Century
Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France
MS Francais 20125, fol. 70r

+ Master of the Roman de Fauvel, Joseph Revealing Himself to His Brothers
From a Bible historiale byr Guiard des Moulins
French (Paris), c.1325-1350
Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France
MS Francais 156, fol. 40r

* Master of the Roman de Fauvel, Joseph Revealing Himself to His Brothers
From a Speculum historiale by Vincent of Beauvais
French (Paris), c. 1333-1334
Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France
MS Francais 316, fol. 75v

* Anonymous, Joseph Reveals Himself to His Brothers
From a Histoires bibliques
French (Saint-Quentin), c. 1350
Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France
MS Francais 1753, fol. 24r

* Stefano di Alberto Azzi, Joseph Meeting His Brothers
From an Ancient History
Italian (Bologna), c. 1353-1359
Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France
MS Francais 168, fol. 68r

* Master of the Livre du Sacre and Workshop, Joseph Meeting His Brothers
From a Speculum historiale by Vincent of Beauvais
French (Paris), c. 1370-1380
Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France
MS NAF 15939, fol. 43r

The image of Egypt in Renaissance and Baroque works is of a fantasy land.  The settings and costumes of the characters are neither clothing contemporary with the painter nor based on any historical model. They suggest a theatrical vision of the “East”.

Between 1515 and 1517 the painters Bacchiacca and Pontormo were commissioned to paint the story of Joseph on the walls of a room within a Florentine palace that were being decorated as a wedding gift for the owner and his new bride.  Three of the paintings illustrated this last episode in the life of Joseph.  All the paintings are now in the National Gallery in London.

* Bacchiacca (Francesco d'Ubertino), Joseph Receives His Brothers
Italian, c. 1515
London, National Gallery

* Bacchiacca (Francesco d'Ubertino), Joseph Pardons His Brothers
Italian, c. 1515
London, National Gallery

+ Jacopo Pontormo, Joseph in Egypt
Italian, c. 1516
London, National Gallery

* Workshop of Antoine Conrade after a Woodcut by Bernard Salomon, Joseph Forgives His Brothers
French, c. 1630-1645
New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Giovanni Battista Gaulli (Baciccio), Joseph Recognized By His Brothers
Italian, c.1680
Ajaccio, Palais Flesch, Musee des Beaux-Arts

Antoine Coypel, Joseph Recognized By His Brothers
French, c. 1730-1731
Paris, Mobilier Nationale

* Franz Anton Maulbertsch, Joseph and His Brothers
Austrian, c. 1745-1750
Budapest, Szépmûvészeti Múzeum

* Peter Cornelius, The Recognition of Joseph by His Brothers
German, c. 1816-1817
Berlin, Nationalgalerie

Similar costuming could have applied to stories from Rome or Persia (with turbans). There is nothing very specifically Egyptian about them. In light of the fact that Egyptian antiquities were relatively well known in Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and about 1800 (think of the obelisks in Rome, for instance) this is a bit puzzling.  The evidence was there, it just wasn't being used.

Images After 1800

The visual image changes that occur after 1800, as exemplified by the undated painting of Joseph Recognized By His Brothers by Francois Gerard, are striking.

Francois Gerard, Joseph Recognized By His Brothers
French, c. 1800
Angers, Musee des Beaux-Arts

Gerard is best known as the painter of the courts of Napoleon I and his Bourbon successors, Louis XVIII and Charles X. His career spans the first half of the 19th century. His Joseph inhabits a world with definite Egyptian details. There are sphinxes on the arms of his chair and above his head on the terrace of a building. He himself wears a nemes headdress. The difference, as they say, is in the details. But what has made the change? In a single word, Napoleon.

In July 1798 then-General Napoleon Bonaparte, at the orders of the Directory then running France following the disastrous years of the Revolution and the Reign of Terror, led a French army across the Mediterranean to land at Alexandria. The intent of the mission was to damage Britain by cutting into her trade routes through the ports of Palestine and the Levant. (The Suez Canal did not exist at this time, remember.) France simultaneously attempted to tie the British down in their home islands by sending an invasion force to Ireland (as part of the ill-fated 1798 rebellion there). All went well at first for Bonaparte. He won several battles over the Mamluk warriors who then held Egypt and took control of the country. He also conquered parts of Palestine. 

Antoine-Jean Gros, Battle of the Pyramids
French, 1810
 Versailles, Chateau

With the French army came scholars whose original intent had been to bring the Egyptians up to date with the Revolution, much as the French army had done in European countries that it had conquered in the years since 1789. However, these scholars soon fell under the spell of the older Egyptian civilization whose relics they saw all around them. Archaeology was then in its infancy, having begun more or less in earnest with the discovery of Pompeii in the late 18th century.  It is they who began the study of ancient Egypt that resulted in the development of Egyptian archaeology. There were also artists among them who set to work sketching and painting the sights that they saw.

In August 1798 the French navy was virtually destroyed by Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson at the Battle of the Nile and the French army was thereby cut off from both resupply and wholesale evacuation from Egypt. Although continuing to function well for another year, it was eventually evident that they could not hope to keep control of the country for very long. So, as he would do again in 1812 in Russia, Napoleon decided to cut his own loses and publicize his victories in advance of eventual defeat.  He quietly slipped out of Egypt back to France. He returned to a France in crisis. The Directory was near collapse and a coup was planned against it. His position as Victor over Egypt gave him brilliant notoriety and shortly after his return he became the leading member of the Consulate that replaced the deposed Directory. By the end of the year he was First Consul. He went on from there to become First Consul for Life and, finally, Emperor.

As for the French army and French scholars left behind in Egypt–their fate was less glorious.  Without adequate resupply the army's ability to continue to hold Egypt diminished dramatically and Egypt was captured by the British in 1801. At that time many of the discoveries made by the scholars fell into the hands of the British, including the famous Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone
Egyptian, 196 BC
London, British Museum

This stele with its text written in ancient hieroglyphs, in demotic Egyptian and in ancient Greek became the key to the problem of deciphering the hieroglyphs and is today in the British Museum, not the Louvre.


However, the information that did come back to France with the scholars and artists set off a craze for all things Egyptian and before long there were Egyptian tea services, Egyptian chairs, sphinx ornamented furniture, Egyptian themed jewelry.  Frequently, items of Egyptomania sat side by side in the homes of the fashionable with equally important Roman Revival objects.

Charles Percier, Egyptian caryatid and design for decorative panel
French, c.1800
Paris, Musee du Louvre, Departement des Arts graphiques

The fact that most of the artifacts found by Napoleon's scholars went to Britain set off a wave of similar Egyptomania there as well. It has been part of our world ever since, ebbing and flowing as new discoveries, such as the tomb of King Tutanhkamun, come to light.

In the realm of painting the Egyptian craze set in motion the search for the exotic that marks the work of so many painters from the second quarter of the 19th century onward. Painters were no longer content to merely imagine exotic locales. They went there to sketch. Examples abound in later 19th-century painting.

The Swiss-born Gleyre, the teacher of many of the major Impressionists, produced images such as the Egyptian Temple of 1840.

Charles Gleyre, Egyptian Temple
Swiss, 1840
Lausanne, Musee Cantonale des Beaux-Arts

Jean-Leon Gerome went to Egypt in 1856 and, from his experiences there produced Napoleon Before the Sphinx.

Jean-Leon Gerome, Napoleon Before the Sphinx
French, 1867
San Simeon, CA, Hearst Castle

The story of Joseph also received more realistic treatment. By the last decades of the 19th century paintings of his story are set in a recognizably ancient Egypt.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Joseph, Overseer of the Pharoah's Granaries
English, 1874
Private Collection

Such pictures as Joseph, Overseer of the Pharaoh's Granaries by the Dutch-British artist, Lawrence Alma-Tadema,


and Joseph Reveals Himself to His Brothers by the Franco-British, James Tissot, inhabit an entirely different world from the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque images.

+ James Tissot, Joseph Reveals Himself to His Brothers
French, c. 1896-1902
New  York, The Jewish Museum

© M. Duffy, 2011-2016.  

Selected images refreshed and additional images added, 2025.

+ Indicates a refreshed image

* Indicates a new image

First Martyrs of the Church of Rome

Jean-Leon Gerome, The Christian Martyrs Last Prayer
French, 1883
Baltimore, Walters Art Museum

Today, June 30, we honor the memory of the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome. These are the mostly nameless men and women who were killed during the first organized persecution of the early church, under the Emperor Nero.

As the Roman historian, Tacitus, tells it, a fire broke out in the city of Rome during July 64. The extent of the fire is not known for certain. But it is known that it destroyed much of the area around what is now the Coliseum.



The Emperor made an effort to relieve the sufferings of those whose homes and businesses were destroyed. However, as people do, the Roman plebs began to blame him for the fire, once it became known that he intended to build a palace for himself in the burned area. In an attempt to divert suspicion from himself he looked for a scapegoat. And he found one among the strange new sect of Jews who were known as Christians. Known Christians were rounded up and tortured. Then others were also picked up, based on information extracted from the first group. They were condemned to death in several of the gruesome ways in which Rome punished criminals – as part of the entertainment in the arena, for example.

Not too many images of this episode in early Church history have been produced. Certainly none were produced at the time. Indeed, it doesn’t seem to have been memorialized artistically until the 19th century. One such is the painting by Jean-Leon Gerome. His painting of Christian Martyrs at Prayer in the Arena shows a group of Christians kneeling together in the center of the Coliseum, surrounded not only by the spectators, but also by other Christians who have been crucified and some who have, as Tacitus suggests, been burned alive to provide light in the evening. Gerome was a late 19th-century academic painter, with a fondness for the exotic and for imaginative reconstructions of historical events. In this case, imagination is certainly in play. For one thing, the Coliseum wasn’t built until after the death of Nero.  The lion is not a figment of his imagination, however.  The use of lions and other wild animals in the Roman amphitheatres is well attested.  They were used to entertain by fighting with each other, or with gladiators or as punishment of criminals, who were sentenced to "damnatio ad bestias".1

Henryk Siemiradski,  Nero's Torches
Polish, 1876
Krakow, National Museum

Another artist who took the deaths of the early Christians as a theme was the Polish painter, Henryk Siemiradski.  His paintings, "Nero's Torches" and "The Christian Dirce"2 were quite famous.  It is interesting that his contemporary and fellow Pole, Henryk Sienkiewicz, wrote what is undoubtedly the most famous novel about those first persecutions, Quo Vadis (1895).

Henryk Siemiradzki, Christian Dirce
Polish, 1897
Krakow, National Museum

However, whatever the reality of the settings in which the first martyrs met their deaths, or how many of them there were, they stand, nobly, at the head of a long and still growing list of martyrs for the faith and at the head of the Litany of the Saints, one of the great treasures of the Catholic faith.

In 2005, in the days between the death of Pope John Paul II and the inauguration of his successor, Pope Benedict XVI, we heard the invocation of the saints in the repetition of the Litany of the Saints several times. Pope Benedict even mentioned it in the homily he delivered at the Inaugural Mass. And, what he said on that occasion is worth repeating.

“On each occasion, in a particular way, I found great consolation in listening to this prayerful chant. How alone we all felt after the passing of John Paul II …….He crossed the threshold of the next life, entering into the mystery of God. But he did not take this step alone. Those who believe are never alone – neither in life nor in death. At that moment, we could call upon the Saints from every age – his friends, his brothers and sisters in the faith – knowing that they would form a living procession to accompany him into the next world, into the glory of God. We knew that his arrival was awaited. Now we know that he is among his own and is truly at home. We were also consoled as we made our solemn entrance into Conclave, to elect the one whom the Lord had chosen. How would we be able to discern his name? How could 115 Bishops, from every culture and every country, discover the one on whom the Lord wished to confer the mission of binding and loosing? Once again, we knew that we were not alone, we knew that we were surrounded, led and guided by the friends of God. And now, at this moment, weak servant of God that I am, I must assume this enormous task, which truly exceeds all human capacity. How can I do this? How will I be able to do it? All of you, my dear friends, have just invoked the entire host of Saints, represented by some of the great names in the history of God’s dealings with mankind. In this way, I too can say with renewed conviction: I am not alone. I do not have to carry alone what in truth I could never carry alone. All the Saints of God are there to protect me, to sustain me and to carry me. And your prayers, my dear friends, your indulgence, your love, your faith and your hope accompany me. Indeed, the communion of Saints consists not only of the great men and women who went before us and whose names we know. All of us belong to the communion of Saints, we who have been baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, we who draw life from the gift of Christ’s Body and Blood, through which he transforms us and makes us like himself."

The Litany reminds us of our heritage as Christians. It is our collective memory, our family history. As I listened to the Litany during those days of the funeral for Pope John Paul II I was deeply moved by the list of names. Here were great men and women going back and back through time. There were the apostles and the other disciples: Mary, Peter, John, Paul, Mary Magdalene. There were the great early bishops and doctors of the Church, east and west: Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, John Crysostom. And the great medieval saints who still influence our world: Catherine of Siena, Francis and Dominic and other great names: Ignatius Loyola, Thomas Aquinas, Teresa de Jesus. But most moving in the context of those days were the names of the martyrs of the early church in Rome and its empire: Lawrence, Tarsicius, Clement,  Agnes, Perpetua and Felicity, Cecilia, and the "Proto-Martiri Romani" some of whom may have died right on the site of the Vatican, in the Roman circus that once stood there, or nearby in Trastevere or just across the short span of the Tiber in the Colosseum or the Campus Martius and whose bodies repose all over Rome. By their lives and by their deaths these men and women showed all future generations the meaning of love for Christ and for the Church – and the price that may have to be paid for that love.

Procession of Female Martyrs

Byzantine Mosaic, second half of 6th century

Ravenna, Basilica of Sant'Appollinare Nuovo

The Litany is endlessly repeatable and endlessly powerful. As it moves forward in time and globally in space, names can be added to its list to honor newly recognized saints or those of particularly local significance.

Jacques de Besançon, Court of Heaven, the Martyrs
from Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine
French (Paris), 1480-1490
Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France
MS Français 245, fol. 156r

In the ordinary life of a Catholic Christian the Litany is seldom heard. It occurs annually during the Easter Vigil. Otherwise, it is confined to special events such as confirmations and ordinations. In some ways, this is sad, because it restricts the hearing of this listing of the names of the “cloud of witnesses” to these events. On the other hand, perhaps hearing it more often would somewhat diminish its impact when heard.

For it does have impact. As one friend, a convert from a non-religious, vaguely Evangelical, upbringing said to me about her memories of the Easter Vigil on which she entered into full Communion with the Catholic Church, “The Litany of the Saints really packed a wallop for me. Here was something my Evangelical upbringing had no room for, here was my family history as a Christian. The knowledge that all these people of the past were alive and were praying for me, along with the people in the church that night was overwhelming.”

Moreover, when we pray the Litany of he Saints we are reminded that we are joined in the fellowship of prayer with those thousands of years of living faith. As Pope Benedict said, “We are not alone.” All of us are united in an eternal ‘now’ of God that destroys the barriers of time and space.

© M. Duffy, 2011

__________________________________________________________
1,   Jacob Coley, Roman Games: Playing with Animals, Department of Greek and Roman Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York at Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History

2.   Dirce is a woman from Greek mythology who was cruel.  As punishment, she was tied to the horns of a bull to be gored to death.  In the Roman amphitheater "amusements" often included using the deaths contained in the mythical stories to put real people to death.   In his "Letter to the Corinthians", Saint Clement of Rome alluded to the recent deaths of Saints Peter and Paul and alluded to an additional

 "great multitude of the elect, who, having through envy endured many indignities and tortures, furnished us with a most excellent example. Through envy, those women, the Danaids and Dircæ, being persecuted, after they had suffered terrible and unspeakable torments, finished the course of their faith with steadfastness, and though weak in body, received a noble reward."

Chapters 5 and 6 of Letter to the Corinthians by Saint Clement of Rome. See: Translated by John Keith. From Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 9. Edited by Allan Menzies. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1896.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. <http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1010.htm>.