The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Andrea Mantegna · also called the Dead Christ, Cristo morto · tempera on canvas, about 68 by 81 cm · one canvas: the dead Christ on a stone slab seen from the feet, a shroud over the legs, a jar of ointment, and three mourners at the upper left, the third cut by the edge · usually dated about 1480, a date still disputed · Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
Mode
Devotional image of the dead Christ; the Lamentation turned from narrative to viewpoint
Mythos
The dead god and the mother mourning the son; the stone of anointing as an altar, and the body on it as the sacrifice
Phase
The hour between the deposition and the burial: the body laid out, the ointment ready, the mourners at the edge
Presentation
Tempera on canvas, about 68 by 81 cm, near monochrome in grey, earth and a muted rose; a figure foreshortened from the feet, the perspective shortened against strict projection
Register
Cold, close and grave; one warm thing, the Virgin’s weeping face, crowded into the corner
Scale
One body, one stone, three mourners, less than a square metre
Governing Proposition
A dead man lies on his back on a stone slab, and the painter has set the body along the line of sight, so that it comes toward the viewer feet first, the wounds of the feet at the front edge and the face at the far end, raised on a pillow. Three mourners are pushed into the upper left corner. The colour is withdrawn almost to grey. The wager of the canvas is that the oldest image of Christian grief can be turned through ninety degrees, from a scene watched from the side to a body attended at its feet, and that the turn will say what no frieze of mourners could: that the god is dead as any man is dead, and that the viewer stands where the anointer stands.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A dead man lies on his back on a slab of veined stone. He is seen from the feet. The soles, with their wounds, are at the front edge of the picture, and the body runs back from them along the line of sight: the legs under a heavy shroud, the bare torso, the hands laid at the sides with their wounds turned up, and at the far end the head, raised on a pillow. At the upper right stands a small jar of ointment. At the upper left, cut by the edge of the canvas, are the mourners: the Virgin, aged and weeping, Saint John beside her, and a third figure mostly lost to the frame, usually taken as Mary Magdalene.
The canvas is Andrea Mantegna’s, painted in tempera, about 68 by 81 centimetres, a little wider than it is high and less than a square metre in all. It is usually dated about 1480, but the date is not settled: proposals run from the middle of the 1470s to about 1500, which is to say from the painter’s middle years to the last decade of his life. Mantegna was born about 1431 and died in 1506. The picture is in the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, where it has stood for two centuries at the centre of the collection and of the painter’s image.
The palette is close to monochrome: grey for the flesh, earth for the cloth and the shadows, and a muted rose in the stone. There is no landscape, no sky, no light from elsewhere, no architecture beyond the slab. The work scored is this one canvas, whatever stands on it as made. Every object in the field belongs to one moment, after the body has been taken down and before it is buried, when the ointment is ready and the body is laid out to be attended. The picture shows that moment and gives the viewer a place in it.
Movement II
The subject was old when Mantegna painted it. The Lamentation and the Entombment came to him as narrative images: the body laid across the picture, parallel to its plane, legible from the side, with the mourners round it in a frieze. Giotto’s Lamentation in the Arena Chapel at Padua, which Mantegna knew, is the great instance. Mantegna had made the scene in that form himself, in his engravings and panels of the Entombment.
Here the body is turned through ninety degrees. It no longer lies across the picture but runs into it, and the viewer’s position replaces the narrative. There is no procession to read from left to right, no sequence of gestures; there is a body, and there is where you stand. The mourners, who carried the scene in the frieze, are pushed into a corner. Colour is withdrawn almost to grisaille. The scale, which in an altarpiece is made for a congregation, is made for one viewer at arm’s length.
The problem of foreshortening a whole figure along the line of sight was not new. Mantegna had met it in his own ceiling oculus at Mantua, and Uccello in his studies. What was new was to make the device the whole of a devotional image, and that broke decorum: the feet first, the body as a corpse, the god seen from below like any of the dead. The slab becomes the stone of anointing and an altar, and a body laid on an altar is a sacrifice. The composition puts the viewer where the anointer, and the celebrant, stands.
Movement III
The foreshortening is not correct, and that is its point. A true projection from a viewpoint this close and this low would give enormous feet in the foreground and a small face lost behind the chest. Mantegna made the feet smaller and the body shorter than geometry allows, so that the feet do not hide the torso and the head. This is the standing view in the literature of the picture, and it turns what might have been a demonstration of perspective into a choice of meaning: the face and the wounds over optical correctness. A display of skill would have kept the feet huge.
The shroud is the summit of the handling. Its folds are cut deep and hard, as if in stone, and they give the legs the weight of a dead thing under cloth and the body a sculptural silence at a small size. Flesh, linen and veined marble are told apart within the near monochrome by touch and tone alone, and the monochrome makes them one substance: the god is matter now. The wounds are exact without becoming spectacle. The hands, turned to show their wounds, are foreshortened each in its own plane. Everything in the field, the jar, the pillow, the wounds, is seen from the same place and made of the same grave matter, and that one viewpoint and one substance are the picture’s law.
The disclosure follows from the form and can be stated. The claim that God became flesh has its consequence shown, not argued: the flesh dies, and the god is dead as any man is dead, a heavy body with grey skin and swollen feet, wounds that are holes, laid on a stone as a corpse is laid out. The viewer stands at the feet, close and below the mourners, where a body is attended at a wake, and anyone who has stood at the foot of a deathbed knows the view. It is said once, by one viewpoint, and much of what the canvas gives beyond it is a state: cold, gravity and silence.
Movement IV
The one warm thing in the picture is crowded to its edge. The Virgin is old, her face creased in weeping, grief without the composure of the Pietà, and her face is the second height of the canvas after the first sight of the body. Beside her Saint John weeps; behind them a third face is mostly lost to the frame. The mother and the beloved disciple at the edge of the body are the Lamentation’s oldest pairing, and through them the picture holds the family, the mother and the son, beside the sacred and the dead.
They are also where the picture yields. The group is cramped, and the third figure is barely a figure. The mourners are seen from a different height and at a different scale from the body, as if from another picture, and their pathos sits beside its cold rather than under its law. The faces of the Virgin and John are painted with a hardness that serves grief but stands apart from the subtle modelling of the body. The picture could stand, colder, as the body alone; it would lose its human cost, and the corner is the one place the canvas admits the living.
Whether the mourners belong to the first campaign of painting has been discussed and is not settled here; nor is the question of other versions and copies. What stands on the canvas as made is the work, and the mourners are judged as part of it, charged where they are weak and credited where they carry the meaning. The questions are part of the picture’s open record, with the others: when it was painted, and for whom, whether for the painter’s own funerary chapel, for private devotion or as a proof of skill.
Movement V
The canvas’s reach in its own decade was small. Mantegna’s wider influence in his time ran through his engravings, his work at Mantua and his antique manner, not through this picture. Its reach came later and has lasted. Annibale Carracci’s Dead Christ answers it directly. Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr Jan Deijman, of 1656, now a fragment, takes up its foreshortened corpse. In 1962 Pier Paolo Pasolini ended Mamma Roma on a shot composed after it. And the photographs of Che Guevara’s body, laid out in 1967, have been read against it, by John Berger among others. The type it fixed, the supine body foreshortened from the feet, is now a way of seeing the dead.
The picture survives whole in its arrangement: body, slab, shroud, wounds, jar and mourners stand, and nothing that carries the meaning is known to be lost or replaced. Its fabric is the frailer part. Tempera on canvas is more vulnerable than panel or oil, and a glue-bound tempera surface tends to wear and dull; the history of its restorations is not set out here, and none is invented. In 2013 the Brera rehung it low, in a darkened room, and the old question of where the viewer should stand became a public one again. The rehanging is presentation, not the work.
The picture holds few orders, and holds them as one: the sacred, death, the mother and the son, the watcher at the feet, and faintly the rite of anointing. There is no state, no labour, no history except what the viewer brings, no natural order, no society beyond three mourners. It is a small devotional canvas of one body, and the narrowness describes the form. Within it the questions have not closed in more than five centuries: the date, the purpose, the reason for the shortened feet, the place of the viewer. The body still comes toward whoever stands before it, feet first, and the wounds are still the first thing met.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged figure by figure, the picture is almost all requirement. Remove the slab and the body floats: it is the stone of anointing, and the corpse’s weight is known by what it rests on. Remove the shroud and the body becomes an anatomy study; its heavy folds make the legs a dead thing under cloth. The jar names the act, anointing for burial. The pillow raises the head just enough for the face to be seen down the length of the body, and the wounds sit where a viewer at the feet must meet them first. What yields is the mourners. The Virgin’s face is the human cost and cannot go, but the group is crowded, the third figure is a fragment, and the picture could stand, colder, as the body alone.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated. The god is dead as any man is dead: a heavy body, grey skin, swollen feet, wounds that are holes in flesh, laid out on a stone as a corpse is laid out. The claim that God became flesh has its consequence shown, not argued: the flesh dies. And the viewer is given a place, at the feet, close and low, where a body is attended at a wake. A second disclosure is the mother, old, her face creased in weeping, grief without the composure of the Pietà. These are meanings, and they hold outside the devotion of the 1480s: anyone who has stood at the foot of a deathbed knows the view. Held near the bar because the disclosure is made once, by one viewpoint, and much of the rest is a state, a cold and silent gravity.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is of one kind: dread and gravity, the sublime of the corpse. Its height is real. The first sight of the body coming toward the viewer from the depth of the picture, feet first, is a shock few paintings give, and the wounds of the feet at the front edge are the nearest thing in the field. The shroud’s folds, hard and deep as carved stone, give the body a monumental weight at a small size. The Virgin’s face gives a second, warmer height, grief at its rawest. What holds the axis is range and frequency. The register is one, cold and close; there is no transport, no light from elsewhere, no grandeur of space; the drama is a single viewpoint, met once and then known. It rises twice, high both times, and does not rise again.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The myth is built, and it is the oldest the Christian West has: the dead god, the body that will rise, the mother mourning the son. It is carried by the structure, not by attributes. The slab is the stone of anointing and an altar, and a body laid on an altar is a sacrifice: the composition puts the viewer where the celebrant stands. The wounds are offered toward the viewer as in the devotional images of the wounds, but here they belong to a corpse rather than to signs held up. The mother and the beloved disciple at the edge are the Lamentation’s oldest pairing. The particular stays particular: this pillow, this jar, these swollen feet, a Virgin with an old woman’s face. Held below the top because the archetype is inherited whole; the painting builds it into a viewpoint, not a new myth.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the Lamentation and the Entombment as narrative images: the body laid across the picture, parallel to its plane, legible from the side, the mourners round it in a frieze, as in Giotto’s Lamentation in the Arena Chapel at Padua, which Mantegna knew, and in his own engravings and panels of the Entombment. The departure is a turn of ninety degrees. The body is set along the line of sight, so that the viewer’s position replaces the narrative; the mourners are pushed to a corner; colour is withdrawn almost to grisaille; the scale is made intimate rather than altar-sized. Foreshortening a whole figure was not new as a problem, in Mantegna’s own ceiling oculus at Mantua and in Uccello’s studies, but it had not been made the whole of a devotional image. The stake was decorum: the feet first, and the body as a corpse.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Substitute a different form and nearly everything goes. The knowledge, that this is a dead body and that you are standing at its feet, exists only as this viewpoint. Laid across the picture it would be a Lamentation like hundreds; seen from the head it would be a portrait of a dead face; seen from above, a diagram. The shortened perspective is form in the service of knowledge: a true projection would give enormous feet and a lost face, and the painter chose the face and the wounds over optical correctness. The near monochrome makes flesh, stone and cloth one substance, which is the meaning: the god is matter now. The size matters too, under a square metre, for a viewer at arm’s length. Held below the top by the mourners’ corner, a second form, a frieze of faces, fitted into the first rather than born of it.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence over promise: more than five centuries, and the questions remain open. When was it painted, early or late in the painter’s life? For whom: his own funerary chapel, private devotion, a demonstration of skill? Is the shortened foreshortening a calculated correction, a devotional hierarchy of face and wounds over feet, or a projection for a viewer standing low and close? Are the mourners of the first campaign? Where should the viewer stand, and how low should the picture hang, a question its rehanging in 2013 made public again? And the later readings: the canvas as a picture of the corpse as such, to which modern writing on death and on photographs of the dead keeps returning. Held below the top because so much of the return concentrates on one device, the viewpoint, rather than spreading across a field of figures and meanings.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is Italian painting of the later fifteenth century, with the painter’s circle in Padua and Mantua. The intrinsic force is high: the picture makes the viewer’s bodily position the subject of a devotional image, and it fixes a type, the supine body foreshortened from the feet, that painting did not have before as a finished image. The discount is for delay: the canvas’s reach in its own decade was small, and Mantegna’s wider influence ran through his engravings, his work at Mantua and his antique manner rather than through this picture. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Annibale Carracci’s Dead Christ answers it directly; Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr Jan Deijman (1656, a fragment) takes up its foreshortened corpse; Pasolini’s Mamma Roma (1962) ends on a shot composed after it; and the photographs of Che Guevara’s body (1967) have been read against it, by John Berger among others.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at more than five centuries. The form is whole as far as can be known: the arrangement that carries the meaning, body, slab, shroud, wounds, jar and mourners, stands, and nothing in it is known to be lost or replaced. The presence is two centuries at the centre of the Brera and of the painter’s image; its path before Milan is not recorded here and is neither credited nor charged, and fame lifts the figure only a little. The fabric is the charge: tempera on canvas is a fragile support, more vulnerable than panel or oil, and a glue-bound tempera surface tends to wear and dull. It stands above The Swing (9.2), for twice the span, and below Las Meninas (9.4), whose presence has been continuous.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Judged as command of tempera on canvas. The making is load-bearing. The foreshortening is calculated and then corrected against its own geometry, a choice only a master of perspective could make deliberately. The shroud is the summit of the handling: folds cut deep and hard, as if in stone, which give the body its weight and its sculptural silence. Flesh, cloth and veined stone are told apart within a near monochrome by touch and tone alone. The wounds are exact without becoming anatomical spectacle. The hands, turned to show their wounds, are foreshortened in their own planes with complete control. The costs: the mourners’ corner is cramped, the third figure barely a figure, and the faces of the Virgin and John are painted with a hardness that serves grief but sits apart from the subtle body.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the soles of the feet at the front edge, and the Virgin’s weeping face in the upper left corner. They largely obey one law. The law is one viewpoint and one substance: everything is seen from where the viewer stands, low and close, and everything, flesh, linen and marble, is rendered in one grave, near colourless matter. The jar, the pillow and the wounds are placed under the same law. What resists is the mourners. They are seen from a different height and at a different scale, crowded in as if from another picture, and their warmer pathos sits beside the body’s cold rather than under its law. The range is also narrow: one body, one stone, one corner of grief, one register, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The orders held: the sacred, in the dead god and the anointing; death and the body, as matter; the family, in the mother and the son; consciousness, in grief and in the watcher placed at the feet; and, faintly, ritual, in the slab as altar and the jar. They are integrated: the one viewpoint places each and makes them one event. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent, which is most of the rubric’s list: no state, no labour, no history except what the viewer brings, no natural order, no society beyond three mourners. It is a small devotional canvas of one body, and the figure describes the form: below The Starry Night (7.4), which holds the cosmos and a village in a field of similar size, and above The Swing (6.4).
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.3, The Made at 9.2 and The Living Form at 9.1. A form in which the knowledge, that this is a dead body and you stand at its feet, exists only as the viewpoint; a foreshortening corrected against its own geometry for the face and the wounds, and a shroud cut like stone; and an arrangement that has come through more than five centuries whole, on a fragile support.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: the sacred, death, the family, the watcher and faintly the rite are held in one viewpoint; the state, labour, history, the natural order and society are absent, and the canvas is one body under a square metre. Below the rest, The Sublime at 8.5, which rises twice and in one register, and The Unconcealment, Pressure on Tradition and The Inner Law at 8.6: one disclosure made by one viewpoint, a reach small in its own decade and long after it, and a law that holds the body and strains at the mourners’ corner.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.3 clears the bar of 8.5 by eight tenths, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.8 by three tenths, and The Unconcealment at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.5, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 104.0, an average of 8.67 that displays 8.7, three and four tenths of the sum short of the Tier V display.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas in the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan (the body on the slab, the shroud, the pillow, the jar and the three mourners at the upper left), of the problem of its foreshortening, of its dating and of its later quotations. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the single canvas in tempera, about 68 by 81 cm, as it stands; under the rule that what was made is all one work, the mourners are scored as part of it, and whether they belong to the first campaign is stated as open. Other versions and copies, if any, are not scored. The rehanging of 2013 is presentation, not the work. The date is given as usual and disputed. Carracci, Rembrandt, Pasolini and the photographs of 1967 are weighed as reach. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them an entry in the painter’s estate after 1506 that may refer to this canvas, the year the Brera acquired it, the owners and whereabouts before Milan, whether the painter kept it, who designed the rehanging, where Carracci’s picture now hangs, and the history of its restorations. No words are quoted.