Easter image: Romanelli's St John and St Peter at Christ’s Tomb

Here is the Easter edition of our works of art depicting the Gospel

Giovanni Francesco Romanelli (1610-1662), St John and St Peter at Christ’s Tomb, c. 1640, oil on copper, 46,8 x 38,42 cm, Los Angeles County Museum

This small devotional painting offers a meditation on the meaning of the verse ‘He saw and he believed’ in John’s Gospel (20, v. 8). Does it mean that John now believes what Mary Magdalen had just told them, Jesus’ body having been taken away? She is waiting anxiously in the background, behind a gate, holding her jar of ointment. Peter and John are easily recognisable thanks to the conventional colours of their garments. The victorious run of John is evoked by the floating of his red drapery and the position of his legs. He is conspicuously behind the older Peter, whom he let enter the tomb first. While Peter, checking among the linen cloths, confirms Magdalen’s story, John’s gesture, with his hands outstretched without grandiloquence and his intense look fixed on the empty sarcophagus, translates a far deeper revelation: he really believes now that the man he has followed until His death on the Cross is the Son of God, risen from the dead.