I haven’t seen this painting for years but have to say that in my memory the blues are bluer and the greens greener than this reproduction gives us. It’s in the Museo Correr, an undervisited and, when I was last there, rather dampish even dingy museum on the corner of the Piazza San Marco. It houses a collection put together by a well born Venetian named Teodoro Correr who avoided all of the political duties expected of the eldest son of an important Venetian family to become an abbot and an art collector. He bequeathed everything to the city on his death in 1830.
Nothing is known about the circumstances of this painting’s provenance. It might be part of a modest altarpiece or a private devotional image for a wealthy household. We do know that Antonello da Messina, a fifteenth century Renaissance painter, was in Venice in the mid 1470s, hence its dating. It’s a poignant image. The dead but very graceful figure of Christ is seated on his tomb supported by three angels. In the background we see a view of Antonello’s native Sicilian landscape: he was born in Messina, but travelled and worked around Italy (Milan, Naples and Venice). Picked out in sharply focused detail we see plants, some skulls, a rear view of the church of San Francesco in Messina, cypress trees, a winding path. There’s a luminosity to the colours because Antonello was using oil paint, one of the very first Italians to do so. At the time most artists in Italy worked with tempera, a paint where pigment was mixed with egg to produce colours that are strong but lack the vibrancy and glow that are achievable with oil. The story goes that it was Antonello who taught Bellini about oil, who taught Titian. Whatever the truth, the fact is that from the sixteenth century on oil paint became and to some extent remains the pre-eminent medium of western European painting.
The sight of a once stunningly beautiful but clearly damaged painting, now rather lonely in a dank Venetian museum, adds to the poignancy of its subject. But we, as modern viewers, have grown the capacity to see eloquence in a lack of finish (the deliberate untidiness of brushwork in Impressionism, for example) and this means that we are not necessarily distracted by the abrasions on the faces of Christ and the angels. We can, in fact, respond to the shapes as abstract but emotive forms: in particular, the upward, pointed curves of the angels’ wings in contrast to Christ’s limp arms, his bent lifeless wrist and the downward tilt of all the figures’ heads. Even so, there’s no explicit hint of the Resurrection. I’m reminded of the angels in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire trying to console the griefs of mortals who yet remain oblivious to their empathetic efforts. That doesn’t make such gestures meaningless; not, certainly not, if there are viewers to acknowledge their moral generosity in doing so.
