It looks laughable:Jesus looking like a piss-eyed man. We are familiar with the doctor as a quack in farcical paintings from the Golden Age, but the doctor as a Jesus figure is much less known. Yet it was a serious theme in painting for centuries.
Since the late Middle Ages, the urine bottle or urinal was a symbol for doctors, which could be found on billboards at their practice. Pissing was a serious business for a long time. The doctor could tell a lot from the color and smell of a patient's urine. For example, whether a woman was pregnant or not.
In the seventeenth century, the laughable variants on this theme were especially popular in painting. For example, a doctor inspects a pregnant woman's urine with great concentration, while everyone can see from her belly that she is pregnant. The doctor is quite the monkey without realizing it. In these kinds of farcical paintings, the viewer always knows more than the main character, in this case the doctor, which creates a comical note.
Sacrilege
The fiddling doctor theme, derived from plays about quacks, was much sought after. Painters could make their works for the free market because there was always enough demand for them. At the same time as this farce version, a lesser-known serious version was also created, the oldest of which is from the early sixteenth century. In this, Jesus is depicted with a bottle full of urine in his hand.
Featured by the editors
MedicineWhat are the microplastics doing in my sunscreen?!
AstronomySun, sea and science
BiologyExpedition to melting land
In Old Holland, In the magazine of the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, art historian Robert E. Gerhardt has for the first time looked at the entire period in which the doctor is depicted as a Jesus figure. Gerhardt wondered whether this was not sacrilege, since the doctor was such a well-known figure as a quack. Did artists also portray Jesus as a quack? No, is his conclusion:Jesus as a healing figure is reverently intended and based on the New Testament. It contains several verses in which Jesus heals people.
According to Gerhardt, the link between Jesus and the symbol of the doctor, the urine bottle, was already made at the end of the thirteenth century. In a French text from this period, Jesus is mentioned as a doctor who examines the urine of the sick and performs a bloodletting. The oldest known depiction of Jesus holding a urine bottle for examination is a woodcut from 1510. It was printed by Thomas van der Noot from Brussels and the text is as follows:in the original or 'Doctor Jesus the master doctor examines the urine (bottle)'. Art historians interpret this woodcut as Jesus healing people from the evils given by the devil.
Many followers
The theme of the doctor as a Jesus figure only really became known through Hendrick Goltzius (1558-1617), himself a lung patient. This famous and popular artist aka printer from Haarlem has made different versions of the theme during his career. After his death, the printing plates came into the hands of other well-known printers, such as Willem Jansz. Blaeu (1571-1638) and Claes Jansz. Visscher II (c. 1578-1652) who published the same print with only some changes in the font.
A popular print, that of Goltzius. It is one of a series of four, called Allegory of the medical profession. In this symbolic representation, the artist has depicted the doctor in four guises. In The Doctor as God the patient seeks healing and looks at his doctor as if it were a God who can perform miracles. In the other three pictures, the doctor is depicted successively as an angel who brings hope, as a human when the patient is cured and as the devil because he writes a large bill.
Emergence of Enlightenment
Van der Noot's figure of Jesus and Goltzius' doctor as God (recognizable by their halo) cannot be seen separately from the increasingly popular farcical quack paintings, but the meaning has been turned 180 degrees. There is much reverence in the serious prints and in the paintings based on them. A late variant was made in 1752 by Jan Jozef Horemans and deviates the most from Goltzius' print. Previously we saw a central Jesus with the patients in the background, in this painting Jesus sits at the bedside of the patient while he examines the urine. (See the large image at the top of the article. The painting hangs in Museum Boerhaave.)
After this, the theme of the physician as Jesus comes to an end and this has to do with the rise of the Enlightenment. As early as the early seventeenth century, a field of tension between science and faith arose because people wondered whether you could play God by healing. However, during the Enlightenment, with its rational thinking and empirical research, faith and science could no longer be united. Artists no longer portrayed doctors as Jesus. Medicine literally lost its religious halo.