What it means to kiss a stranger's feet

Pope Francis blessed the soles of Christian, Hindu and Muslim refugees last week. In the photos of the ritual, Kelly Grovier sees echoes in a 1925 painting from Palestine.

Few rituals are as ancient or as evocative as the washing of feet. If the gesture is finished off with the loving flourish of a kiss, the action is elevated beyond mere humility into something poignantly intimate. Yet it was more than just intense tenderness that vibrated from images captured this week of Pope Francis cleansing and blessing the soles of Christians and non-Christians at a refugee centre on the outskirts of Rome. The photos pose a challenge to cultural prejudices – prejudices that are brought into powerful relief when the images are seen alongside an intriguing and little-known painting created in Palestine in 1925.

The custom of the washing of the feet is undertaken by the Pope each year on Holy Thursday (three days before Easter) in emulation of the actions of Christ, who performed the rite on his 12 apostles at the Last Supper. Though observed annually, the ritual this year was particularly profound. Not only did the occasion mark the official inclusion for the first time of women in the Papal ceremony, it occurred just 48 hours after so-called Islamic State took credit for a deadly terror attack in Brussels. In light of the horrific carnage, the Pope’s invitation to 12 migrants, including three Muslims from Mali, Pakistan, and Syria, to receive the rite, was an act of loving defiance aimed equally at those who perpetrate terror and those who fear the influx of refugees into Europe.

By capturing the exalted leader of one of the world’s largest religions crumpled prostrate before homeless strangers, this week’s photo defies our assumptions of social hierarchy. It also calls to mind countless portrayals in the history of art of Mary Magdalene anointing Christ's feet with perfume and tears and Christ himself washing the feet of his apostles. Indeed nearly everyone from Giotto to Tintoretto, Fra Angelico to Ford Maddox Brown, Rembrandt to Blake has tackled these subjects. But however beautiful traditional depictions of the New Testament scenes may be (Blake’s is especially lyrical), after centuries of staring and being stared at, their repetition of an overly familiar religious story has worn our eyes down like wave-washed stones.

 By contrast, a less well-known treatment of the subject by the British artist David Bomberg, Washing of the Feet (1925), jolts our gaze into fresh perspective. Bomberg’s depiction relies for its unnerving effect on the unknowability of the two masked figures involved in the ceremony. Blurred by prejudice and fear, our eyes could easily, if shamefully, mistake the hooded figures for present-day terror suspects. In fact, Bomberg’s painting captures an actual scene the artist witnessed first-hand in a 12th-Century church in the Armenian quarter of Jerusalem in 1925: the Bishop anointing the feet of the Patriarch of Jerusalem. The only figure behaving suspiciously was the artist, who had sneaked uninvited into the church. Seen side-by-side, this week’s photo of Pope Francis and Bomberg’s painting call us to cleanse our souls of corrosive bias.