(piano playing) Steven: We're in the Brera in
Milan and we're looking at one of Andrea Mantegna's most extraordinary
and most famous paintings. This is The Dead Christ. Beth: Mantegna's son called it The
Foreshortened Christ and this way of representing Christ so foreshortened
is really unusual in art history. Steven: Well certainly I've
never seen anything like this. Now Mantegna was fascinated
throughout much of his career with extreme perspectives. You might think about St. James
being led to his execution where you have a view upward. Beth: Foreshortening is often
used by Renaissance artists to create an illusion of
space, an illusion of depth. But here Mantegna is
using it to draw us in, to make us feel as though
we're at Christ's side at this moment after he's been
taking down off the cross. He's been placed on this stone,
his body is ready to be anointed and shrouded and placed in the tomb. Steven: One of the comments
that people often make when they look at this and
they think about that kind of very careful perspectival
structures that are being developed in the 15th century, is that
this is in fact distorted. That is, the feet are
much too small and in fact there is kind of an odd
distortion as you move up the body where the body seems to grow in size. But what's fascinating is when you
stand in front of the painting, at least for me, the feet
are seen almost through our peripheral vision and our eyes
are drawn right up to the face. Beth: No question, we're drawn
to that look of suffering. We don't have an image of Christ
that transcends human suffering. There's real pain etched on his
forehead, the way that his eyebrows have been pressed together. There's a sense of his humanity here. Steven: There is this incredible sense
of physicality we are so far away from the medieval conception
of the dead Christ, that is transcendent and completely
divorced from any kind of pain. Here, just look at the wounds
in the hand or in the feet, there's almost clinical accuracy. Look at the way in which the
skin has dried and it feels like it might even be sharp. Beth: Look at how Mantegna's
lifted up the hands as though he wants to show us Christ's wounds. The hands are propped up in the same way
the head is propped up by the pillow. Steven: Well those are
almost the only verticals. Now we've been focusing on Christ and
the body of Christ for good reason but Christ is not the only figure here. We seem to be in the
tomb itself, it's dark, but we can make out that there are
three other figures closest to us. We can just barely make out the
profile of St. John the Evangelist. Next to him is an unusual
rendering of the Virgin Mary, who's quite old here and clearly
suffering, seeing her son die. But just beyond Mary you can
just make out Mary Magdalene and the reason that we know
it's her is because on the stone you can see a jar of the
ointment that Mary Magdalene used to anoint Christ's feet. Beth: We often see that jar as
an attribute of Mary Magdalene. So we know that this painting
still belonged to Mantegna at the time of his death. In other words, it was
never delivered to a patron. And so this has led art historians
to speculate that perhaps it was rejected by the patron
because of its extreme focus on the dead body of Christ in this literal
way and its intense foreshortening. It's also possible that Mantegna
painted this for his personal use. We're just not sure. Steven: We're also not sure if
perhaps the intended patron, if there was one, was somebody who
was focusing on the wounds of Christ. Beth: Right, someone whose devotional
practice was focused on the wounds of Christ, someone who perhaps
especially venerated what's known as the Stone of Unction, the stone that
his body was laid on for anointing. Steven: So these are all questions. What we do know is that this is
a painting that in so many ways exemplifies the changes
that are taking place in Italian art in the 15th century
where you have this increasing focus on the physicality of Christ. Beth: We begin to see in the later
part of the 1400's images of Christ, of the saints, depicted very close to us. It's likely that this is related to
ideas of the image as a kind of prompt, to mediate on Christ's suffering. To imagine what it was like
to be at the crucifixion, to put ourselves there at
the tomb at this moment. (piano playing)