Holy Week. Christ; the weight of human sin is far more difficult to bear than the physical torture of the soldiers.

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MAGNIFICAT Holy Week 2013-03-26. 

The Art Essay of the Month

Mocking of Christ ("1596),

Annibale Carracci (1560-1609),

Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna, Italy.

ROME granted Annibale Carracci's Mocking of Christ a singular honour, previously bestowed only on Raphael. This painting crowned Carracci's catafalque during his 1609 funeral at the Pantheon, just as Raphael's Transfiguration had graced his coffin in the same church a century earlier.

Unlike Raphael's monumental altarpiece, the Mocking of Christ was a smaller, more intimate work, meant for personal devotion. The commission had come from Annibale's most important patron, Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, scion of the family that had produced Pope Paul III. Never intended to embellish one of the numerous chapels endowed by the Farnese, it graced the private quarters of the cardinal's palace.

Three figures occupy the canvas expanse. Christ dominates the scene, his head and shoulders filling the centre; one soldier reaches from the lower right corner to place a crown of thorns upon his brow, while another, immersed in shadows, turns, perhaps to call his comrades. The frame encloses only the heads and shoulders, focusing our attention tightly. We find ourselves standing, perhaps uncomfortably, at the heart of the action.

The Gospels describe how Pilate ordered the scourging of Christ before handing him over to be crucified. After the flagellation, the Roman soldiers laid a purple mantle over his soldiers, thrust a reed in his hands, and fashioned a crown of thorns which they pushed on his head, while mocking him with salutes and bows as King of the Jews..

In Carracci's scene, the battalion of sol­diers is reduced to two, but in this close-up the viewer perceives Jesus' pain more intensely. No longer are we bystanders watching from a safe distance, as in Renaissance frescoes. Annibale thrusts us to the forefront. One might easily imagine oneself as one of the soldiers in the realisation of how our own sinfulness makes a mockery of Christ's great love for us.

Annibale's brush erases the welts from the scourge, leaving pristine the flesh of Christ. Only his face reveals his suffering; Christ appears exhausted, as if the weight of human sin is far more difficult to bear than the physical torture of the soldiers.

Carracci did not ignore the written Scriptures lightly. As one of the preferred painters of Counter Reformation patrons, he was keenly aware of how the Church prized fidelity to the Gospels in art. As a Christian and a proponent of artistic naturalism, Carracci's decision to omit the blood shed by Christ and the lacerations of his flesh carried deeper meaning.

Carracci was the forerunner of a new breed of artist, one who would be able to flank theologians and preachers in trying to render the Gospel more vivid and personal to a pub­lic rocked by the Protestant Reformation. One of Annibale Carraccci's closest advisors was Archbishop Giovanni Battista Agucchi, member of the innermost court of Pope Clement VIII. This pope, who had led the Church into the Jubilee year of 1600, fervently believed that art and beauty could inspire the faithful to spiritual greatness. Archbishop Agucchi, consulting with Carracci and his circle, wrote a treatise on beauty and art to guide future generations of painters to use their talents for evangelisation.

 Carracci's Christ radiates beauty. He is luminous while his tormentors are swarthy, his hair curls softly around his shoulders, and his fingers are long and elegant. The red mantle cascading from his shoulders evokes his mortal flesh and his human blood shed for us.

The gnarled fist that presses the crown on Christ's head forms a dramatic contrast with his graceful hands bound by the Roman rope.

Christ's serene beauty draws us to him.

We gaze easily upon his fair features and are all the more outraged to see the soldiers mar his noble face with their rough hands and vicious thorns. He is surrounded by ugliness, cruelty, and ignorance, but the reality of their brutality cannot outshine the beauty of his truth.

Cardinal Ratzinger, addressing a meeting in Rimini in 2002, spoke of beauty and truth in terms that seem intended for Annibale's painting.

"In the Passion of Christ," he said, "the experi­ence of the beautiful has received new depth and new realism. The One who is Beauty itself permitted himself to be slapped in the face, spat upon, crowned with thorns."

The most powerful aspect of Carracci's painting, however, is Christ's expression. Head bowed with weariness, eyes heavy with pain, Jesus nonetheless confronts his aggressor. His face bears neither defiance nor rancour, but profound compassion. From the depths of his suffering, Christ understands the human condition even better. His hands, bound by his captors, do not struggle to break free or remove the crown from his head, but reach out, even at this extreme moment, to draw another soul to himself. Annibale painted the ultimate form of self-giving, il­lustrating the words of John the Evangelist, "now he showed how perfect his love was" (Jn 13:1).

Annibale left a vacant space between Christ and his persecutor, meant to be filled by the viewer. As we stand before it, the outstretched hand of Christ reaches for us, whose sins are like the thorns pressing into his flesh, to call us out of our darkness and into his light.

• Elizabeth Lev Writer and professor of art history in Rome, Italy.

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