The Greatest Picture Ever Painted

Almost two-hundred-and-twenty-six years after her death, Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst’s foresight stands in condemnation of America’s January 6 insurrectionists.

And she was certainly transactionally promiscuous.

To ingratiate herself with the people she would one day rule and in a politically brilliant move, she converted from German Lutheran to the Russian Orthodox, receiving the name Catherine, and – at sixteen - married her second cousin, 17-year-old Karl Peter Ulrich von Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp, Russia’s future Peter III. It was not a happy union. Catherine described him as an “idiot,” “drunkard from Holstein” and “good-for-nothing.” It is reported that Peter abandoned his bride on their wedding night in order to party with friends. 

After two miscarriages (January 1752 and June 1753), the marriage produced two children – Paul (1754 – 1801) and Anna, both of whom were reared by Peter’s childless maternal aunt. Catherine insisted the marriage was never consummated and that Paul – like the two previous conceptions - was the child of Sergei Saltykover, her first lover; she later claimed that Anna (December 9, 1757 – March 8, 1759) was the child of the future king of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, the last monarch of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. After Anna died at fourteen months old, Catherine never again spoke of the child. She did, however, have one other (illegitimate) son – Alexi Grigorievic (1775 – 1854), born years after Peter’s death.

The childless Empress Elizabeth chose the orphaned Peter as her heir, a role he assumed in 1762 at 33-years old. And a role he would not hold for long. Peter, like Catherine was Prussian by heritage and, like Catherine, reared as a Lutheran. Unlike Catherine he only grudgingly accepted Russian Orthodoxy – a religion he was forced to accept.

As the new Emperor, Peter collected enemies as proficiently as he collected lovers: withdrawing from the Seven years War, allowing Prussian expansion in Europe; promising religious freedom in Russia and alienating the Orthodox Church; outlawing the killing of serfs – peasants legally owned by their wealthy masters; and outlawing the notorious secret police.

When Peter and his court established residence in Finland, Catherine – faithful wife that she was not – cultivated her relationships with Russian nobility and the Church and, convinced that Peter was planning to divorce her, secured the support of the military and had the Russian Orthodox Church crown her as the sole ruler of Russia.

After a six-month reign, Peter was arrested and abdicated the same day. His death eight days later was officially attributed to severe hemorrhoids and an apoplexy stroke, although it was largely believed that he was murdered by Alexei Orlov, brother of Catherine’s lover Grigory. 

A failure in foreign policy, Catherine did improve the quality of her empire’s medical service, emphasizing the importance of inoculations against smallpox: "My objective was, through my example, to save from death the multitude of my subjects who, not knowing the value of this technique, and frightened of it, were left in danger." As the owner of half-a-million serfs herself, she had only minimal effect in improving their lives – allowing for some to be educated and preventing owners from killing them. 

A student of the Enlightenment – the late 17th Century through 18th Century scientific, political and philosophical movement known as the “Age of Reason” that influenced America’s Founding Fathers and movement to independence, Catherine’s most enduring contribution as Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796 was as a patron of the Arts.

In 1764, after acquiring a collection of two-hundred paintings from a Berlin merchant, Catherine founded The Hermitage Museum – now the world’s largest in terms of gallery space and expanded to six historic buildings including the Winter Palace along St. Petersburg’s Palace Embankment of the Neva River. 

With exhibit space spanning approximately fifteen miles, 117 staircases and 18,800 doors, today’s Hermitage is second only to the Louvre in size and one of the world’s richest collections of western European paintings since the Middle Ages. It has been estimated that, if you spend a minute at each item and eight hours a day, it would take almost 15 years to see all of the Museum’s exhibits. 

Happily for us, Catherine was, in her own words, “gluttonous” when it came to acquiring paintings by old masters and her contemporaries. Wondrously for us, two years after establishing The Hermitage, Catherine’s agent Andre-Joseph, marquis d’Ancezune, duc de Caderousse procured The Returned of the Prodigal Son by the Dutch master Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (Rembrant).

Russian-born art historian H.W. Janson has written that Prodigal Son “may be [Rembrandt’s] most moving painting. It is also his quietest – a moment stretching into eternity. So pervasive is the mood of tender silence that the viewer feels a kinship with this group. That bond is perhaps stronger and more intimate in this picture than in any earlier work of art.”

American historian Kenneth Clark described Prodigal Son as “a picture which those who have seen the original in St. Petersburg may be forgiven for claiming as the greatest picture ever painted.” 

In late July 1986, through an extremely fortunate confluence of relationships, the Dutch Roman Catholic priest Henri Nouwen (1964-1996), who taught at the University of Notre Dame, Yale Divinity School and Harvard Divinity School, was able to sit for more than four hours in the presence of Rembrandt’s last work, painted two years before his death in 1669.

“I was stunned by its majestic beauty. Its size, larger than life; its abundant reds, browns, and yellows; its shadowy recesses and bright foreground, but most of all the light-enveloped embrace of father and son surrounded by four mysterious bystanders, all of this gripped me with an intensity far beyond my anticipation. There had been moments in which I had wondered whether the real painting might disappoint me. The opposite was true. Its grandeur and splendor made everything recede into the background and held me completely captivated.

“It is a huge work in oil on canvas, eight feet high by six feet wide. It took me a while to simply be there, simply absorbing that I was truly in the presence of what I had so long hoped to see, simply enjoying the fact that I was all by myself sitting in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg looking at the Prodigal Son for as long as I wanted.” 

With canvass and oil, “the greatest picture ever painted” recounts the parable of a self-centered son who broke his father’s heart and “squandered his inheritance on riotous living.” Having reduced himself to the lowest of social standings – feeding the pigs of a farmer in a foreign land - and 

“coming to his senses, he asked himself ‘How many hired servants in my father's house have bread in abundance, while I perish from hunger?  I will arise, and will go to my father, and say to him: ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven, and against you. I am not worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.’

“And rising up he came to his father. And when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and was moved with compassion, and running to him fell upon his neck, and kissed him…”

The Gospel account (Luke 15) of Jesus’s great parable of healthy guilt responded to with empathy, mercy, compassion, generosity, kindness, forgiveness, reconciliation, healing and solemn calm and Rembrandt’s depiction of strength and tenderness stand in stark contrast to what might be called “the return of the insurrectionist.” [We will call him “the insurrectionist” to save his family any more pain.]

On Christmas Eve 2020, the insurrectionist’s son reported to the FBI that his father was planning to do “some serious damage.” Apparently, no one responded to that tip.

“We took the United States Capitol,” he texted his family after the January 6 siege. “We are the Republic of the People.”

“I started the fire,” he told his family, not knowing that his son was secretly recording him on his phone. 

Then:

“Two days after [he] joined the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, federal officials said, he returned home to Wylie, Tex., and proudly told his family of his escapade. But by Jan. 11, when [he] learned the FBI was on to him, he changed his tune, according to an affidavit.

“’If you turn me in, you’re a traitor and you know what happens to traitors … traitors get shot,’  [he], 48, said to his son and daughter, according to his wife, who recounted the conversation to the FBI, which did not name the relatives.

On Saturday, the FBI caught up to him. [He], an oil worker with ties to self-styled militia and right-wing extremist groups, was arrested and charged with obstruction of justice for allegedly threatening his family and unlawful entry into the Capitol.

The Washington Post. January 19, 2021

In a statement read at his father’s sentencing hearing, the son called for the maximum sentence for his father and expressed hope that he would receive mental health counseling during his prison time. The son recognized that his father had “slowly lost himself” over the years and become involved with “a horrible community” obsessed with the now former president of the United States.

“I could really see how my father[‘]s ego and personality fell to his knees when [the former president] spoke, you could tell he listened to [the former president’s] words as if he was truly speaking to him,” his daughter told the sentencing court. “He says a lot of things he doesn’t mean. His mental health is an issue,” she said. “My father’s name wasn’t on the flags everyone was carrying that day. It was another man’s name.” 

The defendant’s wife told reporters the trial showed that “corrupt, evil politicians here in [Washington D.C.]” are trying to undermine American civil liberties. “This isn’t just about [him]. This isn’t about just January 6th. This is about our liberties being stomped on.”

Gospel accounts of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus tell us that, when offered the choice between the release of Jesus or Barabbas, the crowd chose Barabbas - “a murderer” and “an insurrectionist.”

In the days and weeks after the January 6 insurrection, five police officers who served at the Capitol that day died, including two by suicide. Two other officers died by suicide in July 2021. Four people in the attacking mob also died that day – one crushed by stampeding rioters as they surged against the police. In addition, more than 150 officers from the Capitol and Metropolitan Police and local agencies were injured. Hundreds of Capitol workers and congressional staffers were terrorized and traumatized.. 

At this writing, roughly 840 Capital siege defendants have been federally charged, 70 have pleaded guilty, nine have been convicted at trial and 330 defendants are awaiting trial on felony charges and the number of families destroyed and lives forever changed is known only to God. 

All because so many people fell to their knees at the word of one man who - like Pilate - feared the loss of power and privilege.

As communities of Faith, as individuals of Faith, as individuals of no faith, let us pray for the prodigals among us and, when and if they “come to their senses” and admit to themselves and their God “I have sinned against Heaven and against you” and confess their healthy guilt, let us show the kindness of the prodigal’s father.