Mantegna, Dead Christ, c. 1490

This is Beth Harris. This is Isaac Peterson. And this is Stephen Zucker, and we're going to be talking about Dead Christ by Andrea Mantegna. And it's one of the most disturbing, I think most visually powerful paintings to come out of the Renaissance. It's very different than so many other Italian Renaissance paintings because it's so up close and it's so claustrophobic in a way, without that expansive illusion of space that Brunelleschi's perspective made everyone so interested in. But this is still a perspectival painting, powerfully. But you're absolutely right, it's not an open environment in which the figures are placed. This is a painting where the figure, this dead figure, is the subject, and he completely occupies the space. He completely fills the square, nearly square space of the panel. I think it's interesting what you were saying earlier about this being a Venetian painter who was closer to the Northern Renaissance, and the emotionalism of this painting, I think, is only possible through contact with the Northern Renaissance. Through artists like Roger van der Weyden. It's almost blasphemous as a picture of Christ. Christ is really humanly dead. He has not triumphed over death as we see in earlier work in, say, the Byzantine culture, where Christ is all-powerful and his death just barely even affects him. Even in early crucifixions, you see Christ who is perfectly fine, even though he's up on the cross. There seems to be no response to gravity. He is not of this earth. But here, Christ is absolutely physical. Talk about the triumph of the Renaissance, triumph of humanism. Christ has become a human being that could die. Look at the wounds in the feet or in the hands. Look at the edges of those wounds. They're dried. The skin is hardened and sharp. There's almost a kind of clinical, medical quality. You can see the shape of the nail. There are square holes. That's true. It's so brutal. They were really, really pierced by the nails. The foreshortening acts to really bring it so very close to us so that we're like the other two figures at the bedside. We're standing right at the bedside. We could reach our hands out and touch those feet. We're confronted with this dead body, and we react viscerally to the presence of that body. This is something that I think has a lot more resonance when you consider this time when death was very, very present. This is what a plague victim would have looked like. People would have had relatives who died in their homes before burial and had a much closer knowledge of death than we do. The body functions, though. You talked about a kind of intense foreshortening, and clearly that's there, although Mantegna plays sort of fast and loose with foreshortening. The feet are too small. The head is too big. But what that serves to do is to invite us to move up the body almost as if it was a landscape towards that face. The face is the focal point. A look of terrible sadness and suffering and pain on his face. To me, this focus on his actuality of his death only makes the resurrection more miraculous. Mantegna has incredible control over the system developed by Brunelleschi. He's said to be the originator of three-point perspective. But it's amazing to realize, I realized with a sudden shock, how distorted this really is. If you lay down and try and look at your own body in a mirror or something from this perception, and you'll see that because of foreshortening, your feet would become so much bigger. The emotional impact overrides the importance of that sort of scientific basis of Brunelleschi's perspective. And no matter how much we talk about these kinds of issues, come back to this incredibly powerful painting of this dead man.