Tissot: The Ascension as Seen from the Mount of Olives

ILLUSTRATION AND COMMENTARY BY JAMES TISSOT
FROM HIS LIFE OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

Acts of the Apostles — Chap. I:9:
"And when he had said these things, while they looked on, he was raised up: and a cloud received him out of their sight."

James Tissot: "The Resurrection of Jesus is to a certain extent incomplete as long as His glorious Ascension is still unaccomplished. He has resumed His body. He has still to take His own place again, and that He is about to do. After He had given His last instructions to His disciples, Saint Luke tells us that “he led them out as far as Bethany, and he lifted up his hands and blessed them. And it came to pass, while he blessed them he was parted from them and carried up to Heaven."

"The same disciple in the Acts of the Apostles, adds a few characteristic details about the luminous cloud and the angles which appeared. It is evident that the cloud did not resemble a chariot destined to bear the glorified body of Jesus to Heaven, but was simply a veil hiding from the disciples what became of that body, endowed as it now was with special powers. It may perhaps have undergone a kind of dematerialization, fading away in the light to take form again where He was to reign eternally. Or perhaps He may have merely transported to Heaven in the twinkling of an eye, by virtue of His divinity.

"However that may have been, He suddenly faded from sight, and where He had been, a cloud stretched like a veil, hiding the mysteries of God. The apotheosis is complete. Jesus is gone to sit down at the right hand of His Father from whence He shall some day come, according to His promise, to judge the world."

Image: The Ascension as seen from the Mount of Olives (1886-1894) by James Tissot at the Brooklyn Museum.

Brooklyn Museum description: “As Christ ascends to heaven, several witnesses shade their eyes from the blinding view overhead. According to Tissot, the Ascension completes the ‘original idea of Creation,’ which was ‘redemption through Christ’; now humanity, too, is permitted to share in divine glory. ‘The cloud which ‘received Christ from sight’ is like the curtain which falls at the close of a drama,’ he comments.

“In the foreground of the image, Christ’s two footprints remain pressed into the earth as proof of his presence on earth—and in heaven.”