Look Where the Thorns Go in This 600 Year Old Painting

The whites of both eyes are red. Not shadowed. Not pink at the corners the way a tired eye goes pink. Red. Evenly. All the way across. The same red as the blood coming down off the thorns. The same red as the mouth. Somebody mixed that color, loaded a brush, and put it in the one part of a human face that is supposed to stay clean. For years, nobody could agree who did it. The panel was filed under Giotto, or somebody in Giotto's workshop, and left there. It took a 20th century art historian, Roberto Longhi, to look at it properly and put a different name on it. The name he put on it was Fra Angelico. The word for angel sits inside the name we use for him, a name he was not born with and did not take when he became a friar. It got attached afterwards, by people who looked at his soft-faced saints in pale gold light and could not think of anything else to call him. So the man called the Gentle One turns out to have painted a face so unlike the rest of him that for decades it belonged to somebody else entirely. A single board, real gold on it. No room, no soldiers, no crowd, no column, no whip. A head, a neck, the top of a red robe, coming out of black. And it is not in Florence. It is in Livorno, a working port on the Tuscan coast, the kind of town nobody flies into to look at a painting. The crown is the biggest object in the picture, and it is not really a wreath. A crown of thorns usually gets painted as a thin twist of briar. Nasty, but a ring. This is a cable. Thick braided, black-green, sitting on the skull like something structural, with spikes coming off it in every direction, some of them as long as his nose. It has weight. You can see the hair crushed flat underneath it. And at the top of the picture, that crown does something I am going to leave completely alone for now. It is the last thing we will look at, and it only works if you have met the rest of the face first. Behind the head, gold. Not gold paint. Metal. Beaten into leaf, laid down and burnished until it holds light, three broad arms of a cross come out from behind him, one up, two across. That is a cruciform halo, and in Western painting, it is reserved for Christ. Normally, it is left as bare gold, or scored into the surface with a stylus, or drawn in a thin dark line. His is painted red, and around the outer rim of the disc, there is a border of small raised dots. Those were not drawn. Somebody set the point of a metal punch against the gold, struck it, moved along a fraction, struck it again, and kept going the whole way round. Hundreds of strikes, by hand, evenly spaced. Goldsmith's work, on a panel, about a man being tortured. The blood starts under the crown, along the hairline, in a row of small marks where the thorns have gone into the scalp. From there it comes down the forehead in long, thin trails, past the eyebrows, either side of the nose. Two of them run down the cheeks, outside the eyes, both sides, straight down, from any distance at all. That face looks like it is weeping. It is not. There is nothing wet on those eyelids. What is on the cheeks arrived from above and kept going. He did not have to include that. It is the detail that makes this panel hard to stand in front of. It has the shape of grief, and the cause is gravity. Then the shoulders. Red, deep, saturated, the most expensive-looking thing on the panel after the gold, and running across the top of it, a wide band of goldwork with a raised pattern, square stones set into it at intervals, and letters worked in between the stones. Dark. Worn, hard to read even up close. Whatever that garment is, somebody spent real money painting it. Behind all of it, black. Not a room, not sky, not the full sheet of gold a Florentine panel of this kind would usually carry edge to edge. Black. Which means the whole cast has been removed. In the Gospel account, the crowning is a crowded scene, a cohort of soldiers, a colored cloak thrown over him, a reed pushed into his hand, men going down on one knee to call him king. Fra Angelico kept the crown and threw away the crowd. That is also roughly where the certainty stops. We do not know who paid for this, or what room it was made for, or whether it was once part of something bigger. Even the date is argued over, some put it decades later in his working life than others, and nobody has settled it. The gold disc runs right up to the top edge and the red arm of the cross is cut off by it, which either means the board was trimmed at some point in 600 years, or means he designed it that tight. What survives is the object in a port town, with most of its paperwork gone. There is one more possibility, and it is only a possibility. Some historians think this face may not be entirely his invention, that he may have seen a lost painting by Jan van Eyck, a full-face portrait of Christ that circulated in copies, possibly in the papal rooms in Rome where Angelico worked for a time. If that is right, a Florentine friar was looking hard at a Netherlandish holy face and building his own out of it. Nobody can prove it. The original is gone. The letters in the gold, though, are legible. Left of the head, IHS. Right of the head, XPS. Heavy black gothic type, sitting in the metal either side of his face. Anyone raised anywhere near a church has met IHS. It is on altar cloths, on tabernacle doors, cut into the ends of pews, and most people have been handed an explanation for it. Iesus hominum salvator. Iesus saviour of men. In hoc signo. In England. Sometimes, I have suffered. Those were all invented afterwards, by people trying to account for a set of letters they had stopped being able to read. What is written next to his head is Greek. IHS is the first three letters of Jesus, Iota, Eta, Sigma, copied into Latin script by scribes who kept the shapes and lost the sounds, which is why the Eta turns into an H. XPS is the same move on Christos, Chi, Rho, Sigma, so the name beside his face has been through two alphabets, and arrives slightly wrong, and every person who ever knelt in front of this panel read it without breaking stride. Now go back to the forehead, and count. The drops coming down off the crown are not scattered. They sit in a row. They start at roughly the same height. They run to roughly the same length. The gaps between them are close to identical. Blood does not do that. Blood pools, forks, follows the ridges of a face, dries in one place and runs in another. These have been spaced. And once you have seen the spacing, you have already seen it somewhere else on this panel, 30 seconds ago, around the rim of the gold. Same interval, same evenness, same patience. The punch that made the border of the halo and the brush that made the blood on the forehead were doing the identical job, laying down one repeated unit, by hand, with care, all the way across. That is not a picture of an injury. It is an injury that somebody has designed. Every drop is a decision. A man sat down with a small brush and worked out where each one would fall, how far apart, how long. He gave the wound the same treatment he gave the gold, and it is not only the blood. Count the red on this panel, the drops, the mouth, the robe, the three arms of the cross inside the gold, and the whites of his eyes. Four of those five are things, fluid, flesh, cloth, a sign. The fifth is not a thing at all. It is the inside of a person, and it has gone the color of the other four. That is where we started. And it is the one detail here that no convention asked for and no soldier put there, because this was never made to be looked at the way you are looking at it now. He was a Dominican friar, and the thing worth knowing about him is not where he trained or who he worked for. It is who his pictures were for. The clearest evidence turns up in the convent of San Marco, in Florence, where he and his workshop painted not on the church walls where visitors would see them, but upstairs, in the small cells where individual friars slept. One image to a room, one viewer, alone, in silence, for years, with nothing else on the wall. In one of those cells he painted this same subject, Christ crowned, mocked, for one man to kneel in front of. Think about what that does to how you paint a face. If an image has to survive being stared at by the same man every morning for a decade, it cannot shout. A scream is exhausting after 10 minutes. A grimace is theater by the second week. What you need is a face that is still giving something back on the 4000th morning. So look at what this one is not doing. The brow is not knotted. The mouth is closed. He has a cable of thorns driven into his skull and he is holding absolutely still because the friar painting him needed him to be able to hold it for years, which puts the robe back on the table and the crown with it. Go back to the scene he deleted. What the soldiers actually do in it dress him up. They make a crown out of the sharpest cheap thing in the yard. They throw a colored cloak over his shoulders. They put a reed in his hand for a scepter, Kneel down and hail him. It is a costume gag. Three props and a punchline. Fra Angelico kept two of the three props and painted them straight. The crown here is not a joke object. It is heavy. It is built. It has structure. The cloak is not a soldier's rag. It is a vestment with a goldsmith's collar, set stones, and a text worked into the band. He took the equipment of the mockery and made it the real thing, properly, at cost. The soldiers meant it as a joke. He is the only person in the story who took the joke seriously. He got a reputation out of a lifetime of this, and it was not for the blood. A hundred years after he died, Vasari wrote him up as a sort of holy innocent with a brush. That he never picked one up without praying first. That he could not paint a crucifixion without crying while he did it. That he refused to go back and correct anything, because whatever came out was what had been intended. Vasari is a century late, and he is building a legend. But the legend is what stuck, and it is why the man who painted this face is filed under angelic. He was buried in Rome. There is a slab over him with an epitaph that argues with the legend. The gist of it, do not praise me for having been a great painter, praise me for what I gave away. Now the top of the picture. Pick one of the long thorns on the left side of his head, one of the ones pointing up and out. Follow it away from the skull, past the hair, past the dark band of the crown. It does not stop at the gold. The thorns cross into the halo. Several of them painted dark on top of the gold leaf, and one or two run nearly out to that punched border at the rim. Think about what a halo is as a piece of picture making. It is the one element in a panel like this that is not an object. You cannot bump into it. It casts no shadow. It is not in the room. It is a flat gold statement that the person underneath it is God, structurally, the untouchable part of the image. He ran the thorns through it. Nothing required that. There is no rule of iconography that asks for it, and hundreds of painters set the crown neatly inside the disk instead. Here, the one thing allowed to cross out of the world and into the gold is the joke crown, the yard scrap wreath the soldiers threw together in five minutes to be funny. This panel has moved twice in living memory. It sat for years in Livorno's Civic Museum. In late 2005, it crossed the Atlantic for a Fra Angelico retrospective in New York, and when it came home, the diocese was turning 200 years old, and they did not put it back in the museum. They put it in the cathedral. It hangs in the Duomo di Livorno now, in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament. A picture made for one friar in one cell, in a working church where anyone can walk in. Go and find it. Get close enough to see the punch marks in the gold. Then pick one thorn on the left of his head and follow it outward. Off the skull, past the hair, past the black of the crown, and watch it leave the man and stop inside the gold, a little short of the edge. 600 years, and nobody has been able to take it back out.