“The lamp of the body is the eye, if therefore your eye is clear your whole body will be full of light.  But if your eye is bad your whole body will be full of darkness.  If therefore the light that is in you is full of darkness, how great is that darkness!   Matthew 6:22-23
 
            One of the true giants of Western art is the painter Diego Velazquez (1599-1660).  His realism is so expressive that he anticipated and inspired the expressionism of Monet and others.  His singular ambition was to paint the truth.  No crucifixion painting excels his.  His portrait of Pope Innocent X (a Borgia) shows him to be manipulative, stressed, and cruel.  His many portraits of the dwarfs and the retarded kept for the amusement of Spain’s royal family, always reveal their pain and their dignity.

            There were times, however, when truthful representation was not his first priority.  Velazquez was appointed court painter to Phillip IV of Spain in 1623.  His first portrait of this Hapsburg king was accurate and ugly.  King Phillip I had been known as “the handsome” but four generations of inbreeding produced features more misshapen than those of the court dwarfs.  Over the years the painter and the king became close friends.  The portraits of the king looked more and more handsome.  Sometime late in his career Velazquez went back to the first portrait and painted over it.  He covered it with a handsome, idealized image of his friend, King Phillip.

            And what of his own image?   In his most famous painting, “Las Meninas” Velazquez paints himself painting the little princess Infanta Margarita.  The princess, her dwarfs, dog, and family are all recorded with photographic precision.  The painter, himself staring out at the viewer, is tall, dark, handsome.  He looks to be about 30 (instead of 58), and bears none of the marks deceased children, a dead wife, and chronic illness would leave.  He is aloof, noble, unperturbed.

            I guess his honesty was selective.

            My favorite self-portrait by an artist is that of Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757).  She was a successful portraitist who was known for her flattering likenesses (or unlikenesses).  Because of her idealized portraits she became a favorite of royalty.  In her self portrait she paints herself painting her own portrait.

            Her face looks at the viewer.  It is a pretty face, an imperfect face, a normal face.  The portrait she holds for us to see is clearly her own, but the portrait within the portrait is younger, thinner, idealized.  She is admitting her own lie, exposing her own prejudice.

            What a gift that is.

            Complete objectivity is impossible, of course.  All of us, no matter how honest, colour at least some of what we see with our own prejudices – passing over the flaws of our friends and magnifying those of our adversaries.  All of us look in the mirror with distortion.  The idea that we can be truly objective, truly free of prejudice is arrogant and self-deceiving.  We can, however, know ourselves well enough to compensate for the prejudices we have.

            When my wife and I were first married we had a color television that was purchased used from an Econo-Lodge for $20.00.  It was a “color” television in that everything in the screen was a various shade of green.  Roses, the Sky, Polar Bears were all green.  The thing is, after a while, your eyes began to compensate for that, and a rose began to look like a rose again, instead of a head of cabbage.

            All of us admit the Light into our lives imperfectly.  If we have the reference points of prayer, self-knowledge and His Word, the Light, however colored, will be enough.  If we draw the shade of ignorance over an already colored window pane, how great will be the darkness inside.