Scroll details leap of faith
CHICAGO — As a pair of conservators at the Field Museum slowly unrolled an ancient Chinese scroll, it dramatically revealed how far the Christian faith has traveled since that first Christmas in Bethlehem.
Though the delicate watercolor of a Madonna and Child is among the oldest visual evidences of Christianity in the Far East, the museum had prosaically dubbed it "catalog number 116027." For decades, it sat in a dimly lit case, cracked and soiled. The details were hard to discern.
"I only began to realize how important this thing is when we (recently) had it restored," said curator Bennet Bronson. "Look."
His finger hovered above the figure of a European-looking Mary holding an infant Jesus with a forelock knotted in the Chinese style. That multicultural iconography witnesses Christianity's ability to cross cultural borders, noted Bronson, an anthropologist.
The participants in the first Nativity scene presumably looked like the contemporary Semitic peoples of the Middle East. Shortly afterward, Christianity moved into the wider world of Greece and Rome — as is reflected by the Madonna of the Field Museum's scroll, who looks like she stepped out of a Byzantine portrait. During the Middle Ages, missionaries carried the faith across mountains and deserts to China, where the scroll's artist gave Jesus the look of the child next door.
"He wanted to make it clear that Christianity was a universal religion," Bronson said.
He added the scroll, which was painted on paper and backed with cloth, not only illustrates the long road Christianity took to China; it also survived the ups and downs the faith went through there, only to be subject to the vicissitudes of modern scholarship.
It was brought to Chicago by Berthold Laufer, a museum staffer who bought it in 1910 from a prominent family in Singan, China, that had owned it for many generations. He dated the scroll to the 17th Century, a period when Jesuit missionaries were known to have arrived in China.
In the scroll's lower left corner are two Chinese characters representing the name of a famed artist, Tang Yin, who lived from about 1470 to 1523. Because that was before the Jesuit period, Laufer decided the signature was a forgery, subsequently added to protect the painting's owners during a period when Christianity was suppressed in China.
But in more recent decades, opinion about the scroll has shifted, noted Lauren Arnold, an art historian and fellow of the Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at the University of San Francisco.
First, scholars noticed a striking similarity between the scroll and a famous painting housed in a church in Rome. It seemed likely that missionaries had carried a copy of the earlier work to China, where it was copied by the scroll's artist.
Arnold said that prototype arrived long before Laufer's dating of the scroll. She explained that since his time, scholars have become more aware that the Jesuits weren't the first to missionize the East.
"To me, the Field Museum's scroll is the missing link," said Arnold, author of "Princely Gifts and Papal Treasures: The Franciscan Mission to China and its Influence on the Art of the West 1250-1350."
She noted that Chinese tradition long revered a Madonna-like figure, Guanyin, a goddess of mercy. However, before missionaries arrived, she was depicted as a solitary figure.
The Field Museum scroll, she added, completes that cultural transformation: Guanyin has morphed into the Virgin, and Jesus has been transformed into a Chinese infant. Arnold thinks Laufer got it wrong: the signature on the scroll truly is that of a 15th and 16th Century artist. To her mind, it testifies to how quickly China incorporated Christian ideas into its own.
The story of the scroll, she said, has a universal appeal. The owners of the Madonna and Child scroll must have felt it, or else why would they have kept it during times when Christianity had to go underground in China? Arnold feels its tug, especially at this time of year.
"The New Testament tells the story of a teenage mother, traveling with her husband, there's no room at the inn, they're homeless; then shepherds and kings appear, and their fortunes go from the lowest to the highest," Arnold said. "The scroll's image, a mother nurturing and caring for a child — who doesn't that resonate to?"
