Plate Ten: FAITH

A ragged beggar accosts a traveling merchant. Neither figure appears in any of the other nine plates. The beggar, a man of late middle age, holds a sack out for the merchant to peer inside; perhaps he is a peddler. Or perhaps his is a pilgrim. The beggar-man wears tattered, earth-colored clothing, or perhaps he is simply coated with the dust of the road he walks. His feet are sandaled and his beard and hair are close-trimmed and neat. His posture is excellent; he might be a former general or bishop, who has forsaken a past life for the sake of him pilgrimage. As he stands in the left foreground, facing rightwards, we see the teeth of his slight smile.

In the right foreground, the merchant peers down into the sack with pursed lips. Her clothes, too, are coated with trail dust, and made shapeless by wear and sweat. Soft light escaping from the sack illuminates her face from below, which would look sinister if sunlight from above were not also shining down upon her. Her profile may be less impressive than her counterpart’s, for she slouches slightly.

While her left hand reaches up towards the lip of the sack the pilgrim holds in front of her, her right loosely grasps a cable, which extends back behind her to the lead of a mule train. Only one and a half mules are visible in the plate, but the cable stretches out past the second mule towards an unseen third, and perhaps fourth or fifth or more. The two visible mules ignore the tableau before them in favor of sniffling and nibbling at grass growing on the side of the road behind the merchant. The lead mule is weighed down with wineskins, but the second mule’s burden cannot be seen.

Above them, rays of sunlight fill the sky, emanating not from the sun, but from a woman’s face. This golden face, perhaps simply a fanciful depiction of the sun, mirrors the reflected seen in the eighth plate, RUIN. She and her halo of sunrays fill the upper third of the plate. The face stares directly out towards the viewer; her eyes lined up to yours. Her shining halos and golden tones contrast sharply with her slack and neutral expression; her lips slightly parted and her eyes half-lidded, as if she were about to drift off to smug sleep.

Behind the pilgrim, in the distance approaching the forested horizon, Jack is a tiny splash of blue and red against the verdant green-gold fields. He holds one hand high above his head, either waving towards the foreground, or playing with his dog Armor-of-God, just discernible in the hazy spring day.