Hans Süss von Kulmbach and Adriaen van Overbeke follow Albrecht Dürer during the 1500s in depicting the ascension of Christ.

The stimulus is in the Gospel of Luke 24:50-53, a passage that celebrates the blessing of Jesus’ disciples and His departure.

There has been a long habit of depicting Christ leaving the pictorial space in medieval manuscripts. Most of these paintings allow only His feet and lower legs, most of the time engulfed by clouds, to appear on the top of the image.  

Just His feet, nothing less! 

The bottom part is just a “charade” of characters, maybe the twelve apostles and the Virgin Mary. Every time His disciples are portraited standing on the ground, looking up into the skies.

But why only the feet?

There always has been some kind of modesty in dealing with the divine.

Nobody can face it with baldness when it’s almost impossible to convey an experience, and mostly an existential experience with someone. It’s impossible to figure out what has not been lived in person, what to say about Christ?

Even the birth story in Mathew, for instance, can be viewed as a humble attempt to figure out the nature of Christ. 

The account of the family of Jesus that escapes to Egypt walking via maris is a moment that I would describe as a “happy feet” moment.

Muhammad after his revelation, thinking of going mad, ran down the mountain to his wife Khadija, that covered him in a cloak and held him. So the Kherqa is a symbol of the impotence of men to understand the divine. It’s the mother’s womb where to find all security and earth groundedness that stands against the unknown.

Oddly in 1996 Mullah Omar removed the cloak from the shrine where it was held and showed it to his followers as a sign of power. Before being run down a few years later after the surrender of Kandahar.

Hence another “happy feet” moment.

But let’s step back a little bit. The earliest Ascension image existent is in the Munich National Museum, usually dated around 400 c.e.

The depiction is quite different, this time. There is some proximity to the story of Jacob’s Ladder since Jesus is pictured stepping up to the clouds where a hand is waiting for Him and in the process of giving Him the last lift.

Everything is clear and the reference to an Old Testament story indubitable.

So there are two different representations, that are completely distant. Well, more than 1000 years! They are distant in expressiveness, feeling of the divine, morality.

But then… I remembered John 1:51: you will see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. So Jesus is the ladder, you have to walk upon him! It’s the mean by which salvation is brought about.

Another happy feet moment!