The Baptism and the Ministry

The Jordan, the wilderness, the wedding at Cana and the supper table: the public years between childhood and arrest.

Between the infancy and the Passion sit the baptism in the Jordan, the calling of the disciples, the miracles and the Transfiguration. Painters treated this stretch far more sparsely than the two ends of the story, and the pictures that do exist are often narrow in shape — they were predella panels, the small horizontal scenes running under a large altarpiece, where the whole ministry might be given four boxes.