Faith Works: Preach the Gospel at all times, in many ways
Ludwig Bang is a minor German regional artist who has been preaching the Good News to Licking County since somewhere around 1901.
That’s been my theme for some weeks now: to unveil the symbolism and messages in two paintings that perhaps too long have been seen as cryptic and obscure, not as the richly allusive and potentially compelling narratives they are.
Placed squarely behind the chief judge’s bench in the center of the main courtroom in the Licking County courthouse, not only the artist who painted them but the officials who paid for and approved them had to be aware of what was being said in these visual images. They’re not just two pictures selected for attractive, placid, decorative value.
There’s a saying attributed to St. Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel at all times; if necessary, use words.” We’re not sure who said it first, and it can be abused (nothing wrong with a good sermon!), but the message is clear. Good news, God’s good news in particular, needs to be communicated by image and example and in song and story, not just from pulpits on Sundays.
I do not know Mr. Bang’s religion. It would be safe but not certain to call him a Lutheran from his place of origin and ultimate destination, the resort community of Bad Doberan in northern Germany. I’m quite certain he knows his Bible from Isaiah in the Hebrew Scriptures to Revelation at the conclusion of the Christian testament.
And he knows his art, Winslow Homer much beloved in America, and Greek sculpture as seen through the lens of the Louvre.
The echo of “The Veteran in a New Field” is changed not just by the addition of a wife and child and angel overhead, but a subtle difference: he’s wearing breeches and stockings in Bang’s painting, evocative of Revolutionary garb. And the counterpart work showing the same man going off to war, if you look closely (and perhaps soon more visible after restoration work), shows unmistakably British soldiers marching across a distant battlefield. This may be work done in 1901 or just after, but the year 1876 is still blazoned across the exterior stonework, marking the centennial of American Independence, and the reminders are still all around of a heritage in wars both revolutionary and civil.
You could read the two paintings as a grim harbinger of doom, sacrifice bravely accepted even as a spouse mourns in advance, the child all uncomprehending, invoking the losses in 1776 and the 1860s as having built our republic to this date, flanked by two assassinated presidents on either side, Lincoln and McKinley. The price of liberty.
Or you could read them as a pairing which interrogates one other, and asks of us as the viewers: which way do we want the story to go? The angel of God’s presence is with us in either case, but the initiative is with us as citizens, and as a nation. Do we continue to turn scythes into swords, or muskets, or worse, or can we send our veterans back to the farm, to their children and families, to peace?
The choice, Bang is saying, is ours.
You could call these paintings cryptic, and to the casual viewer, they are. But if you spend time reflecting and considering what the respective images are saying, to each other, and jointly to us, the viewers — witnesses and defendants and officers of the court and citizens in general — they are evocative and instructive works, which are still speaking to us, even in 2022.
And I suspect for many years to come.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he appreciates your patience in letting him guide you through these narrative paintings. Tell him if you think antique art can teach us today at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
This article originally appeared on Newark Advocate: Faith Works: Preach the Gospel at all times, in many ways
