Perspective and Memory: <em>The Flagellation of Christ</em>

This painting has been the subject of immense speculation and mystery. Nothing is known of its origins or the occasion of its commissioning and there has been great speculation as to its subject, using iconographic techniques and historical sources. Experts (eg Kenneth Clark) date the production of the painting between 1455 and 1460 on stylistic and historical grounds, however this has not helped with the identification of the subject matter.

Leaving aside the iconographic uncertainties, let us approach a formal analysis of the painting to see if it can give us some clues about the painting’s underlying structure of meaning. Whatever uncertainties surround its production and the manifest content of its figuration, there are some certainties, some definite evidence from within the painting itself, that can allow us access to its intentions.

1.

Approaching the painting one’s first impression is of a strange and daring mixture of elements. Bold, imposing, clear-lighted figures dominate the foreground plane on the right. A shadowy, mysterious, receding, ethereal and enigmatic tableau is portrayed in the space within the left of the painting. The latter is so completely different in mood, spatial equivalent, size and light from the clear day-lighted, external and present space of its counterpart on the right. (The recession within the left of the painting, however, is balanced by an enigmatic profiled seated figure watching the flagellation, in brighter colours and illuminated in a way that the rest of the tableau scene is not. This profiled figure in colour and light contains echoes the figuration in the right of the painting and offers some balance to it).

The great mystery that is one’s first impression of the painting seems to be the result of this extraordinary and bold juxtaposition of space and light and recession; which however seems to be held together in some sort of underlying unity that is impossible to recognise on the surface. One senses an underlying harmonic order, even though one is confronted by huge contrast. This paradox seems to be the initial communication; the initial mystery presented by the piece.

2.

The next phase of looking does not at all seem to provide easy understanding. Indeed the figures appear more not less mute.

As one looks at the three figures on the right one gets the sense of an intense interaction, an intense debate, but there is no simple conversation represented. The eyes of the three figures do not meet: the middle beatific image, his hair framed by the background chestnut tree echoing his curls, gazes up and out to the upper left, his thoughts directed away in a thoughtful or yearning fashion. The intense focussed harder gaze of the man in profile on the right looks intently across at the bearded, imposing, “Greek”, figure on the left, and yet this latter does not return the gaze. He looks instead past the former’s left hand shoulder, out of the picture, his left hand raised in apparent supplication. We notice in contrast the clenched fists of the right hand figure buried in his garments, and the relaxed, sinuous, stylish hand pose of the beatific middle figure, his left hand inverted on his hip, palm cupped outwards in a reversal of the normal movement.

If someone is talking it is the “Greek” on the left, if someone is listening it is the “hard” man on the right, if someone is dreaming it is the “beatific” central figure (this latter’s gaze similar to the hoisted dream-like backwards glance into history represented in Jack Yeats’ painting ‘In Memory’ 1915 - which has not a dissimilar formal structure).

On the left there is similarly an intense, dramatic engagement. Christ is represented in a soft, yielding, passive pose. A man with raised arm holding a whip to his right, apparently ready to strike. Another man is to Christ’s left, his left hand behind Christ’s back holding his bound wrists; he is looking across to his companion torturer, waiting for his signal. Then in front of this tableau, mysteriously with back to us, is another figure, left knee unweighted in the classic fashion, left hand outstretched towards Pilate; a figure whose posture and dress seems the reverse view of the beatific figure on the right. He is witnessing the imminent flagellation, along with the stern, impassive, almost disconnected figure of Pilate on the far left, whose left hand palm is placed down over his knee, his right enfolded in his garments.

3.

The strangeness of this mute tableau is enhanced by the treatment of the lighting, which in the left of Piero’s picture is mysterious and non-logical. As one follows the alcoves of the ceiling backwards in recessive space, there is a golden transparent light clearly striking the middle of the alcoves from a window to the right. This light catches the golden statue at the top of the pillar in the front of which Christ stands, and further catches Pilate’s profile and the podium on which he sits. However this same light does not, as it should have done, illuminate the floor at this plane of depth, nor in consequence does it illuminate the Christ and flagellator’s tableau or observing figure with back to us. These four figures thus appear out of logical light and somehow out of the time of the painting in an almost translucent grey-toned ghostly space. Their shadowiness seems to place them outside the logic of the rest of the painting.

4.

So two intense tableaux: an intense debate apparent on the right foreground; the incipient mute beating mysteriously observed in the receded left, with Pilate’s stony profile. They exist juxtaposed and radically different – yet mysteriously in harmony. How is this? The key to the painting comes in the analysis of the perspective. What unifies these disparate tableaux in formal terms is the fact that they are contained within one perspective system. Follow the lines of recession - from the rooftop at the upper right down to the Greek’s arm; through the black marbled roof element down the top left; up the pattern of the marbled flooring, all to a single vanishing point in the darkness just to the right of the right hip of the man with the whip. The vanishing point is exactly on the vertical bisection of the picture, but located in darkness, not leading to any figure. The only figurative connection is that it is directly beneath the vertical line of the flagellating whip, the prime subject of the painting.

Then as one follows the middle lines of recession the true meaning of the painting begins to unfold. A mid line on the right falls through the shoulder of the hard man on the right, through the supplicant raised left hand of the Greek and his clenched right hand, to the vanishing point. Another perspective line runs from Pilate’s eyes through the left forearm of the attending guard to Christ’s right, which holds him. Another runs from the feet of the hard man on the right through those of the ethereal man. Another runs from the trophy held by the statue through the flagellating soldier’s face. There are other interesting perspective details. The furthest plane is marked by an oblique banister glimpsed through a portico behind Pilate: this banister is parallel to the perspectival recession of the marble inlaid roof above and creates a kind of final end point. In the next plane forward the line of the upper arm of the left hand soldier joins with the left forearm of the hard man on the right to form a frontal intersection in the vertical plane of the vanishing point: somehow locking the foreground plane and the most background plane of the painting together into a unitary system. The amazingly carefully worked out perspective system is full of correspondences of this kind. One understands from this that the picture is contained within one perspective system and, by analogy, within one mental system. The painting is a unified thought, unified through the perspective structure. The perspective structure also allows the painting to be organised around receding planes which themselves can be read as planes of memory and history as well as formally linking spatial depth together in a surface organisation. Thus the perspective here functions as much more than a means of generating an illusion of pictorial depth (that is the least of its functions here). The perspective system becomes the architecture of the painting, which allows its thinking to be articulated. It allows unexpected correspondence between apparently completely dissimilar parts of the work - and it is within these underlying and unexpected correspondences that the formal meaning of the painting can be read.

As we have already seen, the perspective hinges around the vertical plane of the flagellating whip and the soldier’s raised fist holding it. This is then the starting point for the argument of the painting. It then allows extraordinary connections between the events happening in that receded space and those in the foreground right - in the linkage between Pilate’s gaze, the soldier’s restraining arm, and Jesus’ hands; or between the raised hands of the Greek and the shoulder of the man in blue on the right.

5.

Once this perspective system is admitted, then other lines of formal structure and correspondence emerge quickly one after the other. The line joining Christ’s eyes, the outstretched hand of the watching man with his back to us, and Pilate’s passive left hand on knee. The line between the left hand soldier’s eyes, Christ’s eyes, the right hand soldier’s eyes and then the clenched fists of the Greek and the man in blue. The direct horizontal connection between Pilate’s eyes and the clenched fists of the man in blue in the foreground. The left hand soldier’s raised right fist holding a whip, Christ’s eyes and the heart of the right hand soldier. The direct horizontal between Christ’s eyes, the Greek’s supplicant hand, and the youth’s inverted hand (the latter’s left arm pose echoing Christ’s left arm pose). It is these horizontal linkages between the gaze interactions of the left hand tableau and the hand interactions of the right hand tableau that seem to me to come to the heart of the formal structure. In this way the radical foreground of the three figures on the right is directly linked with the intense drama going on within the recessed plane. The connections draw one’s attention to the language of hands in the painting, wherein the key argument probably lies.

6.

So – the painting begins with the raised right arm of the flagellating soldier preparing to strike Christ, watched intensely by the other soldier and impassively by Pilate. Christ’s gaze is held clearly to the raised right arm of the soldier, and a continuation of that line of gaze (in the key connector of the painting) extends straight into the blue man’s eyes on the right, and extends backwards in the other direction through the left hand soldier’s heart to Pilate’s seated right arm. The mysterious figure in front of Christ back to us holds out his left hand in a gesture of supplication towards Pilate’s own passive left hand (as noted the line of these two hands extends to Jesus’ eyes and extending from them to the eye’s of the Greek, who also holds his left hand out in an angle of supplication identical to the man in front of Christ). The extension of Christ’s eyes through the right hand soldier’s eyes leads to the clenched fists of the man in blue passing through the clenched right fist of the Greek. The beatific central figure on the right seems an inversion of the mysterious figure in the recessed plane with back to us: unlike the latter whose left hand is inverted into a form reminiscent of Christ’s, whereas his right hands impassive by his side. Thus there are two key hand movements that I take to be the movements of supplication and of protest, one from the right hand tableau; one from the left hand tableau. The left hand figure motions to Pilate to stop the flagellation. The right hand figure’s gesture motions to the man in blue. Pilate looks impassive. The man in blue looks impassive. Jesus, although not the focal point of the perspective, becomes a focal point of the eye lines, which connect hands and eyes to the right and left of the painting. The man in blue shows two clenched fists and the Greek shows a right clenched fist, both in line with Christ’s eyes. The dialogue of hands on the right is intimately linked with the drama of eyes on the left.

There is a debate therefore being played out in the daylight in the present, in the current reality of the right. This echoes and reflects the tableau on the left. The question in both areas of the picture unified into one thought by the perspective: “is this to go ahead or not?” The suffering figure of Christ, mirrors on the one hand the beatific youth on the right, and on the other hand the latter is echoed in inverted form in the observer of the scene (proxy for us?) The flagellation tableau in recession then is both memory, moral imperative from the past, mythology, and a moral structure impacting on the present.

There is a moral dilemma in the present reflecting that in the past: the formal structure of the painting makes this clear. Exactly what this current moral dilemma is must remain speculative. However the interpretation supported by this analysis suggests that the painting is a commemoration of the dilemma faced by the Greek and the blue man in relation to the youth. The Greek holds his hand to stay the punishment, the blue man looks impassive, and by his clenched fist reflects an implacable decision to proceed. This gesture echoes the dilemma reflected in the Greek’s right hand, also clenched, in contrast to his left, and echoes Pilate’s passive abnegation of responsibility symbolised by his own left hand. Counsels of caution or compassion are expressed in both periods, in both planes of recession, in both elements of the image - but in both cases it seems as though these are to be to no avail. The flagellation started, the boy was killed.

However, quite apart from such speculative details of content, the deeper formal content of the painting seems to be about present and past, memory and conscience, morality and expediency. The curious figure of Pilate to the left, detached in its colouration and lighting from the tableau it watches, and underneath the dedication of the painting from “Piero of Borgo san sepulcro”. Does this make the painting a memento mori? Is Piero the moralist pointing at the morals of his own city, his own day, the clear daylight to the right of the image, and shining in on the golden statue and Pilate on the left? The flagellation scene, quiet, receded, unimposing, acts as a quiet but intense centre of the image putting the events of the current day into perspective.

7.

Piero has created the most highly wrought complex symbolically classical image in the Renaissance period; to be repeated later through Poussin, David, Cezanne and into many painters of the modern period. In his dense philosophical moral as well as sublime image he uses the structure of perspective to bind together disparate past and present; moral ideal and practical reality; memory and experience, into a unified structure that informs and illuminates. It makes me think that the San Sepulcro risen Christ painting may be more moralistic than it first appears. Piero may be a humanist truth teller as well as a great painter.

Urbino
2004