Et Partu Fontis Exceptum: The Typology of Birth and Baptism in an Unusual Spanish Image of Jesus Baptized in a Font

Abstract

A capital with an unusual scene of the Baptism of Jesus has recently been excavated in the late twelfth-century cloister of San Juan de la Pena (Huesca). Remarkable for its depiction of a youthful Saviour seated in a footed baptismal font, the image deviates significantly from the traditional Romanesque formula of an adult Jesus baptized in the Jordan River. Examination of this motif's iconographic roots locates it among a small family of similar northern Spanish images, the earliest of which is an illumination in the so-called Beatus of Gerona, dated A. D. 975. The unconventional motif of the Baptism in a font seems to have resulted from a deliberate iconographic borrowing, by which an image of the Bath of the Infant Jesus at the Nativity was deliberately recast as a Baptism scene. This borrowing depends in part upon pictorial similarities between the traditional formulas of Bath and Baptism, but it is supported by a venerable ideological typology which links the purification of Christian baptism with ...