Resurrection

A lot of readers have told me they enjoy the occasional art reference that pops up on this little blog from time to time like a thief in the night (to use an apt Biblical expression). So, as a little belated Easter egg of sorts, I’ve decided to type up an entire post just about art – no films, no TV series, just paintings for once. (You have been warned!)

We will take a little Easter stroll through one of the most renowned museums in Europe for this, and we will keep beaming ourselves to other places from time to time, too, whenever we need to take a quick peek at another painting for comparison. (Isn’t it great that, in your imagination, you can just basically jump from town to town, city to city, country to country? In real life, you’d need to take a plane to look at all the paintings we’re going to discuss today, and you most certainly wouldn’t manage that whole round trip in a single day. On this blog here, however, we can do whatever the hell we want!)

The main painting under discussion today isn’t a particularly famous one; it’s largely only known to experts in the field, to be quite honest. And I do have to say I enjoy this fact quite a bit. There are lots of Easter-themed images that are probably well-known to you. But I doubt that many of you know the one we’re going to talk about today (perhaps some of you will, but I’m willing to bet that most of you won’t).

In any case…the painting we’re going to discuss is, of course, connected to the theme of the holiday which has just recently come and gone, undoubtedly giving some of you cause for celebration and making some gain a few pounds due to the absurd amounts of lamb, wine and chocolate eggs consumed.

It was an eventful Easter break for many of us, I’m sure, and perhaps you’d like at least some of the sensations to linger on for a bit longer, which is what art is for, I suppose. But never more than on this one specific holiday. These three days – from Good Friday through Easter Sunday – are without doubt thematically the most important days in art history bar none.

And we’re not talking about our friend the Easter bunny here (we all love him, I know, and I’ve still got one such chocolate chap waiting to be devoured by yours truly sitting in front of me right now); we are, of course, talking about the Christian theme of crucifixion and resurrection that has arguably influenced and shaped art like no other subject matter in the entire history of European art.

Let us take a look at today’s painting now, and I’ll even let you in on a little secret because this here, my friends, is my favourite Jesus depiction in all of art history…well, at least at the moment. I tend to cycle through them from time to time, with my absolute favourite changing every couple of years. (We’ve all been there, I know, I know.)

So, let us begin, sit back, pour yourselves a glass of tempranillo and get the chocolate eggs out. We’re going to go on a little field trip together now…

If you’ve ever been to Madrid, then you have undoubtedly visited the Prado museum at some point, walking through exhibition room after exhibition room starstruck and speechless in absolute awe and wonder – or dragging your tired feet, trying to locate an empty bench to rest your behind on for a moment because you were physically and mentally exhausted after the first hour already.

Now, if your stay in Madrid lasted longer than just one day, you might have even squeezed in a visit to the Museo Reina Sofía in order to see Picasso’s (1937) ‘Guernica’ because your travel guide or the internet said so. (And the travel guide or the internet were absolutely right on that one, I should add.)

And if you were really thorough or the weather was rather rainy during your stay in Madrid, you might have decided to use another one of your precious vacation days for a visit to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, to name the third great venue of the Golden Triangle in this city simply blessed with an abundance of wonderful European art.

Now, most people who visit the Thyssen-Bornemisza, one should point out, are interested in what can be found on its lower floors: the Impressionists and Expressionists, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Kirchner, Schiele…to name but a few.

“What’s another floor filled with mediaeval, Renaissance and Baroque art to me?” people generally sigh, shrugging their tired shoulders. “I’ve done all of that yesterday at the Prado already, and I can’t bear any more blood splatters, lavish costumes, half-naked goddesses and tortured saints. I think I’ll just scream if I see any more blood, gore, pomp and circumstance. I need something relaxing now, sparkling light reflexes on the surface of a pond and canvases dappled with budding flowers and such. I need to give my retinas a rest, for crying out loud!”

If people venture into the collection up on the second floor at all, it’s usually just for a brief detour to take a quick look at a few famous highlights up there (the only surviving portrait of Henry VIII by Hans Holbein’s own hand, say, or Albrecht Dürer’s famous ‘Christ among the Doctors’).

In short, people will take a quick stroll around the upper floor (if they venture there at all) and then make a beeline for the lower floors to see the 19^th- and 20^th-century collection downstairs that they actually came for.

It’s only when you come to Madrid again and again for personal reasons or if you work in the field (or both) that you’ll end up taking a much more in-depth look at what’s actually hanging on the walls of that second floor of the Thyssen-Bornemisza…and this is when it’ll suddenly hit you:

Perhaps you’re just in the process of admiring the tiny and exquisite ‘Annunciation’ diptych by Jan van Eyck, with Ghent always playing on your mind, deeply engrossed in the illusionistic way in which the great master made oil paint look like actual, real stone so deceptively that you could have sworn you were looking at marble sculptures and a solid stone frame instead of something painted in oil on a wooden panel with a brush.

(Source: Wikimedia Commons; image is in the public domain.)

Perhaps you’re still immersed in this sublime experience as you walk away from this wonderful and exquisite work of art, barely paying attention to the other paintings (and visitors) you encounter after that.

You’re in Room 3 on the second floor now, but this one is essentially connected to Room 4 in the open-floor plan of the museum; so you just round a corner and…

…are suddenly struck by a most peculiar and almost shocking sight:

There!

Over there…at the far end of Room 4…there’s a half-naked and clearly seriously injured young man..who’s seemingly coming, nay…limping, nay…staggering towards you. Yes, you (!), the viewer who was just so engrossed in that van Eyck diptych a second ago.

For a moment, you recoil in shock because the man you can see emerging out of the dark there is clearly none other than…

…Jesus himself.

This, dear reader, is the point where you start to seriously question your pre-lunch choices earlier in the day: You could have sworn you’d just had that one little glass during la hora del vermut.

You take off your glasses, give them a thorough wipe down, put them back on again…aaaand…he’s still there. Dammit.

Jesus is right there in front of you.

Well, your better half tends to call you insane; granted that only happens when you’ve managed to disturb the apparently sacred food storage order in the fridge or something in that vein, but who knows: Maybe you’ve finally managed to cross into clinically insane territory proper. Because there he still is, no matter how hard you blink: Jesus isn’t budging.

(Source: Wikimedia Commons; image is in the public domain.)

You walk up closer to the man, and…of course, it’s a painting. (Phew! Not that that rules out the ‘insane’ diagnosis once and for all, but at least you’re not hallucinating yet.)

And, by God, has this painting been cleverly hanged by some giggling, cackling curator gleefully rubbing their palms together…or something:

It’s hanging just at eye level (slightly lower than you’d expect) and just opposite the spot where you typically come walking round the corner of the other wall of paintings once you’re finished with those, so it really gives you the impression that the subject in it (Jesus) is coming towards you, emerging out of the dark. The depiction is about life-size, too, which compounds the effect.

And here comes the first thing you, dear reader, might note with consternation, “Is this painting even hanging on the right floor? Shouldn’t this go where all the other Surrealists are? Like…this is clearly a modern work of art, and those are all downstairs, right? Where all the 20^th-century art can be found!”

Well, here comes my first little electric shock with the cattle prod for you (or second rather, after you’ve already got the first one when you caught that first glimpse of this pale, life-sized Jesus helplessly staggering towards you a few moments ago):

This strange picture was painted sometime around the year 1490.

Read that again!

1490.

This painting is more than 500 years old!

But this isn’t even the most extraordinary thing about it. (And I promise the experience of seeing this thing up close and in person is actually much more intense and shocking than whatever feelings I’m trying to instill in you here as you watch it on this tiny, little screen. For one, the colours, though still pastel-ish, are much more vivid. The sheer size of it alone hits you, as I said, in ways that are difficult to emulate in a blog post.)

Now, you might think, ‘Ooookay. I get that its size and the way it’s hanging there can give you a bit of a jump scare as you round that corner and walk into that exhibition room. But subject-matter-wise, it’s not that unusual, is it? So, Jesus is doing his suffering bit and everything…So what? Isn’t that what he’s supposed to be doing?’

Well…no!

No. No. No.

Let me say it again one more time, just for clarity: No!

This is a highly unusual painting, and it’s not at all what you’d expect in a painting of this genre.

But in order to understand just how unusual it is, you need to know what is usually to be expected in a painting like this. To be able to see the rare, exceptional and unique, one has to know the common, wide-spread and popular. To know why something is unusual, you have to understand what is typical.

What is the generally accepted practice here and which types of Jesus depictions are there in the first place? What makes this painting so unique?

Please join me on a whirlwind tour through European art – with many, many stopovers at both sacred and secular paintings. Let’s look at funny frogs, scolding mums, the man in the moon and, perhaps, the Easter bunny. (Oh, and, of course, a few handsome half-naked men while we’re at it. I mean, let’s not pretend you didn’t know why you came to this blog in the first place.)

So, let’s paint the town red, in tempera and oil, and brush up on our art history knowledge.

Easel does it, let’s get a mauve on. (Please, for the love of God, someone stop me and my awful puns. These are physically painful.)