Pietro Perugino, Baptism of Christ (fresco, part. opt.2)

Description

The scene of Christ's Baptism is the first on the wall to the right of the altar, looking toward it, and parallels Moses' departure for Egypt and the circumcision of his son Eliezer on the opposite side. In fact, there was a precise parallelism between the ceremonies of circumcision and baptism respectively in the Jewish and Christian worlds, also implying the deeper and more spiritual dimension of the latter. In this sense, baptism, as also written by St. Augustine and many of the Fathers of the Church, was a sort of "spiritual circumcision" for children. The scene is set according to a symmetrical scheme, typical of Perugino. In the center, the Jordan River flows straight towards the viewer, up to the feet of Jesus and John the Baptist who is baptizing him, in the foreground. The dove of the Holy Spirit descends from heaven, sent by God the Father on high, represented within a nimbus of light with seraphim and cherubs and flanked by two angels in flight.