We have learned that this is author JK Rowling's favorite painting, Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus. About Caravaggio's 1601 painting, Rowling says "Jesus reveals himself to the disciples having risen from the dead. I love it. Jesus looks very likeable ...and the painting captures the exact moment when the disciples realize who this man is, blessing their bread.” Now add this to her love of the poet Chesteron (and her public admiration of CS Lewis) and we are indeed pondering the themes for Book VII - if not a clue to her final plot turn. What made this moment so shocking - the "victim" revealed the truth (as in this moment from Luke 24:30-31 "When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight."
We know that there is going to be a major surprise (she has told us she completely plotted out the story line - boring as that is, she admits - before she wrote the prose) which she has been planning for since the first book. Most people think it has to do with deaths (and perhaps it does), but what if it also has to do with life? Remember Charles Dicken's Tale of Two Cities, "Recalled to Life?" What is Harry looking at here anyway?
What made this moment in Carvaggio's painting so momentous is that it is the moment that the disciples recognized Him (identity revealed) and remembered what He'd said to them beforehand (foreshadowing hints that gave the story away if they'd been paying attention earlier) - the Lord had prepared them but their attention was diverted elsewhere (readers beware). In this moment, they see (which is the point of every great mystery novel, that epiphany - that AHA! moment). It was in the breaking of the bread, by being inside the story that the disciples recognized who He was and in that moment understood the story, the most amazing plot twist ever. This was done not with Spielberg-Lucas special effects, but came in a regular storyboard character/plot moment, breaking bread. The way this painting illustrates this moment, they are at supper, having a regular meal as they must have done hundreds of times before - but only in this moment are their eyes opened, the vision of their eyes and the vision of their souls.
They are saved.
If this is the sort of thing that inspires Jo Rowling, what are we to expect in the seventh and final book?
1 comment:
Harry gets saved at a Billy Graham style crusade. He burns all his text books and witnesses to his teachers and classmates quoting Ex 22:18 and Deut 18:9-12 in a booming Southern accent, leaves Hogwarts and enrolls as a grad student at Bob Jones University. :p
-Robert
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