Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Andrea Mantegna
Italian; 16th-century
Paris, France: Musée Jacquemart-André
89%
Ecce Homo. c1500. Oil on canvas
Of course the dryness and the pallor are great, as is the taut expressivity of each face, and the emotional range conveyed by all the characters taken together, and the fullness of the painting's field with figures, and that limpid halo, and the two small trompe-l'oeil postings in the upper corners that somehow manage not to undermine the scene's overall reticence with respect to the picture plane. But what makes the painting great (which is related to that reticence) is the distance which Christ maintains from the outside of the image, despite his closeness to its surface. His fingers curl inwards, his left arm is shadowed as it recedes into the picture, he's tugged a bit by the soldiers, the rope cuts his body off from the space just in front of it. This is a picture of address that continuously pulls itself inwards, negating itself. Mantegna was Italian art at its most withheld, which is to say that there's a proleptic recognition of the untenability of its idealism in his canvases. (TFS, 2025)