Alas Canon Timothy Russ has died. Here is a fine obituary telling us about his fascinating life and deep historical interests:
The question remained, however: who was the painter? The more Russ looked at the canvas, the more he became sure he knew the answer.
It was not the “Lady” herself who presented him with clues to the artist’s identity, but allegories and puzzles in the background. Russ spent months identifying and analysing these visual devices, seeing in them allegories about the bloodshed of the Reformation.
For example, the sitter is placed in front of blood-red ruins — denoting, Russ thought, the destruction of Catholic churches. In a chip in a pillar on the left of the canvas, Russ said, some observers saw a face with a crooked triple tiara – as worn by the Pope. He himself saw in it a wolf, a symbol of the Papacy in an age when “Christendom is in danger of splitting”. Then, to the Lady’s right, Russ pointed out several tiny profiles – images, he was sure, of Henry VIII, of which there were nine in total.
Above all, he saw at the foot of one column a baby in swaddling — a reference, he thought, to Edward VI, who was born in 1537, superseding Mary in line to the throne. If so, Russ argued, it would also explain the sitter’s dress, for Mary would have been in mourning for her stepmother, Jane Seymour, who died giving birth to Edward.
The date, and the puzzles, led Russ to identify the artist as Hans Holbein, whose masterpiece, The Ambassadors (also filled with visual puzzles) was painted in 1533. Russ considered the possibility that he might have unearthed a lost work by Holbein to be “a small miracle”. In fact, it would have been a substantial miracle: worth at least £50 million, the potential “Holbein” would have been enough to buy Sawston 10 times over...
Canon Timothy came into my life in October 2010 when I attended a Mass he led in Great Missenden for Yugoslavs murdered by Tito's communists with the British Army playing a disgraceful part.
Here is some of what he said in a wonderful sermon that pulled no punches at all yet was wise and generous:
Canon Timothy Russ delivered an unflinching sermon. He described the killings as "a massive disorder, a massive wickedness, a massive sadness." He placed this example of Marxist brutality in a wider European school of banal philosophical thought that denied any Christian or natural moral order and instead insisted that people had no intrinsic worth. The result had been the mass elimination of people who thought differently, or just were in the way.
When Pope John Paul II visited Sarajevo in 1997, he repeated this famous spiritual insight: "The two most difficult things in the world are to forgive -- and to seek forgiveness." At the Mass of Reparation in Great Missenden this week, Canon Russ took up this theme. He addressed the cruelty of the British officers concerned who had had to resort to deception to steer these huge crowds of desperate people back to their doom, and the wickedness of those who did the killings: "Those who decided, those who lied, those who gave orders, those who did the shooting -- this Mass is for them too.... It does sinners a grave injustice to say that they cannot help what they do."
The world loses another holy man. Someone who understood the difference between Good and Evil.
