In the Louvre, in a small room near the end of the Italian galleries, Leonardo's Saint John the Baptist hangs almost alone. The painting is dark — a figure emerging from a near-black background. John is half-nude, wrapped in what may be animal skin, holding a slender reed cross in his left hand. His right hand is raised. The index finger points straight up.
The Finger That Points Elsewhere
He is smiling. This is the detail visitors cannot stop looking at. It is not a wide smile. It is small, closed-lipped, almost conspiratorial. His eyes, dark and soft, look directly at you. The mouth turns up just slightly at the corners. Nothing about this face fits the traditional image of the Baptist — a wild-eyed ascetic of the desert, dressed in camel hair, shouting repentance. This John looks like someone who has understood something, and knows you do not yet.
The Voice That Points Away From Itself
The Gospel of John quotes the Baptist describing himself in a single sentence:
"He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord, as said the prophet Isaiah."
I am the voice. Not "I am a prophet." Not "I am important." A voice — a thing that makes sound and then disappears into air. A voice that says one thing: make straight the way of the Lord. The preaching of the Baptist is consistently about someone other than himself. He says, he must increase, but I must decrease. He says, the latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose. He is a finger that points elsewhere.
Leonardo has painted the finger. The entire composition rises to it. The pointing up is unavoidable. But the painter has also painted the face beneath the finger, and that face — smiling, knowing, intimate — is what holds you. The smile is the painter's commentary. John does not seem burdened by his role. He seems, in fact, to be in on something.
What the Painter Knew
Leonardo worked on this picture in the last years of his life. It is one of the paintings he carried with him when he left Italy for France in 1516, at the invitation of King Francis I. He kept it near him until his death in 1519. For three years, the Baptist and the old painter shared a room.
There is a temptation to read biography into the painting — an old artist, close to his end, painting the figure who said I must decrease, knowing that his own increase was nearly finished. Whether that reading is true or not, the painting seems to accept it. The finger pointing up is also the finger of a man letting go.
The Forty Seconds
Write the verse out by hand — just the clause: I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Forty seconds. In that time you feel what the painting knows. That being a voice is different from being a person. That the best any of us can do, sometimes, is to be the finger that points toward what we are not. And that this pointing, if we have understood it, can make us smile.
The finger is still up. The face is still smiling. The voice has already gone on ahead.