In 1953, Al Blaustein was invited by Margaret Blake and the Skowhegan faculty to paint the North wall (on the right side when facing the pulpit). Blaustein’s fresco depicts scenes from the Old Testament—Job’s Suffering, the Foolish Men, the Burning Bush, Aaron’s Rod, the Sacrificial Lambs with the Tablets of the Ten Commandments, and, finally, the Sacrifice of Isaac. In preparation for his fresco, Blaustein carefully reread relevant passages of the Old Testament, studied earlier artworks, and consulted people conversant in the Scriptures (Cummings 47).
Scenes from The Book of Job
In the Book of Job, God boasts to the heavenly court about his faithful servant, Job, a wealthy man “who was perfect and uprights, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil” (Job 1:1). Satan questions God about Job’s faithfulness, for he is a wealthy man with many servants, livestock (sheep, oxen, donkeys, camels), and healthy children. Satan asks God: “Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land. But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face” (Job 1:10–11). Satan then wagers with God to test the truth and the strength of Job’s righteousness through a series of unjust punishments. Satan destroys all of Job’s livestock and kills his servants. While Job’s sons and daughters dine and feast at his eldest son’s house, Satan torments Job by destroying his house and killing all of his children. However, Job does not lose faith. Next, Satan plagues Job with boils and sores, hoping that cursing his physical body would break his faith. Despite his grief and physical suffering, Job does not curse God and his faith remains intact.
Blaustein begins his visual narrative with Satan’s first attacks on Job. Starting at the top of the wall, we see a burning building collapsing, depicted as geometric shapes that fold on top of one another. Blaustein does not depict Job’s children inside the wreckage. However, he does include a naked woman and a child, their bodies contorted, painted with red blotches of color and sickly greens. We also see animals, alluding to the loss of Job’s livestock.
To the right of the burning house, we see Satan’s second wave of attacks, with Job, his body diseased with boils and sores. The paint application contributes to conveying Job’s physical suffering with scratch-like marks. Staying consistent with the iconographic tradition, Blaustein depicts Job nude, only wearing a loin cloth, while holding an object that resembles a wooden plank but could be the potsherd that Job uses to scratch at his sores (De Capoa 306). Job’s hands, as they grip the object, appear to join in prayer, as often seen in depictions of Job (Von der Osten 155). However, Blaustein, does not depict Job’s wife or friends, who are often represented comforting Job (Meyer 25).
(photo: Doyle).
The Foolish Men
Above the first window, three men stand in conversation in a town setting. They are the three friends who try to comfort Job but believe he must have sinned to deserve his sufferings. However, Job dismisses them, as he believes that his friends cannot understand God’s intentions.
The Burning Bush and Aaron’s Rod
In the center of the wall, Blaustein represented two episodes from the book of Exodus: the Burning Bush and Aaron’s Rod. The Burning Bush seems to be bursting from the wall, while next to it, lays a serpent, ablaze and rendered in fragmented abstract shapes, which suggest transformation.
In the biblical account, God appears before Moses through the burning fire that does not consume the bush. “[O]ut of the midst of the bush,” God calls: “Moses, Moses. … Here am I” (Exodus 3:3). God acknowledges that he hears the cries of his people, knowing that they suffer under the torment of the Egyptians. God explains to Moses that he has come to deliver them and commands Moses to appear before Pharaoh to announce that he will take God’s children away from Egypt.
In Exodus 7:9 God tells Moses and his brother Aaron: “When Pharaoh shall speak unto you, saying, Shew a miracle for you: then thou [Moses] shalt say unto Aaron, Take thy rod, and cast it before Pharaoh, and it shall become a serpent.” Blaustein does not conform to the traditional depictions as he does not depiect figures such as Moses, Aaron, or Pharaoh, instead focusing on what for him symbolizes “the force and reality of the supreme supernatural being” (qtd. in Cummings 47).
The Sacrificial Lambs and the Tablets of the Law
Above the second window, we see the star of David, a cross, the Tablets of the Law, and three lambs. These symbols might allude to different moments in the history of faith, recalling the division into ante legem, before the law (Star of David), sub lege, under the law (The Tablets of the Law), and sub gratia, under grace, that is after Christ’s coming (the cross). Blaustein gives emphasis to the tablets, placed on a ledge higher than the other two symbols, flanked on the other side by sacrificial lambs.
The Sacrifice of Isaac
Blaustein concludes the wall with another image of suffering and faith: Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Taking advantage of the window’s position, Blaustein sets a crumbling cliff, with a downward diagonal of thorny vines that entraps a contorted figure and a ram. To the right, as if emerging from the gallery loft, is a large, hooded figure who holds up a scythe with a bony arm and looks down. This is Abraham about to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as ordered by God. In the biblical narrative, Abraham binds Isaac and places him on an altar. As he stretches “forth his hand . . . to slay his son,” an angel sent by God stops him. Abraham, instead of sacrificing his son, sacrifices a ram that was “caught in a thicket by his horns” (Genesis 22:10 and 13).
The two famous bronze relief “Competition panels” for the Florence Baptistery show how differently artists can interpret the scene. Filippo Brunelleschi shows the angel stopping Abraham as he is about to plunge his knife into Isaac’s throat. In Lorenzo Ghiberti’s winning entry, the angel is just entering the scene. Blaustein takes the suspense even further: no angel is to be seen.
The manifestations of God (the Burning Bush and Aaron’s Rod) that appear in the center of the wall are thus framed by two scenes in which faith is tested. Furthermore, the figures of Job and Abraham are juxtaposed to the three foolish men and the sacrificial animals: Blaustein explained that he meant them to stand as exemplars of “orthodoxy and unexacting belief.” As the artist used “contemporary clothes and local backgrounds whenever possible,” he conveyed “the timelessness of the questions of faith and sacrifice” (qtd. in Cummings 41).
—Ari Trueba
- Cummings, Mildred H. South Solon: The Story of a Meeting House. South Solon, Maine: South Solon Historical Society, 1959
- De Capoa, Chiara. Old Testament Figures in Art. Edited by Stefano Zuffi. Translated by Thomas Michael Hartmann. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003.
- Meyer, Kathi. “St. Job as a Patron of Music.” The Art Bulletin 36.1 (1954): 21–31.
- Shapley, Fern Rusk, and Clarence Kennedy. “Brunelleschi in Competition with Ghiberti.” The Art Bulletin 5.2 (1922): 31–34.
- King James Bible Online.
- Von der Osten, G. “Job and Christ: The Development of a Devotional Image.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 16. 1/2 (1953): 153–58.