Christ among the Doctors

The one episode of the middle years

Between the infancy and the baptism the gospels give exactly one scene. Luke reports that the twelve-year-old Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem after Passover and was found three days later in the Temple among the teachers, listening and questioning. Everything else in those eighteen years is unrecorded, and painting has nothing to work with there.

Where it falls

At the close of the infancy sequence. The Presentation and the flight into Egypt come before it; the baptism in the Jordan comes after, with Christ already grown. Because the episode is a dispute rather than an event, the Lombard workshops of the early sixteenth century treated it as a bank of half-length heads pressed close together — the argument carried by faces and hands instead of by architecture.

The record

The catalogue gives Bernardino Luini, 1530, and the National Gallery, London. The dimensions are 72.4 by 85.7 centimetres, a horizontal well under life size, which matches the close-framed treatment rather than a temple interior. The style is entered as High Renaissance and the artist as Italian. The measured palette reads as brown and red. The subject classification in the entry is inconsistent with the title and is not repeated. No commission or provenance is recorded.