Art SCHEGES No. 5/2021 Special SS. Easter-THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST (Part 2)

 

From the funeral sheet to the symbol of glory

The scene changes with Mathis Gr ünewald (1480-1528). The risen Christ of Isenheim Retablo is portrayed in an elevated movement, mid-air, with the shroud dragged out of the sepulchre, transforms into a dress with dazzling colors, from bedsheet funeral symbol of glory. That same Jesus we see in another panel with the horrendously plagued body, a man of pain ′′ without appearance nor beauty ′′ (Isaiah 53,2), now manifests himself as a sun of righteousness. Antoninis or Antonites, the religious order that cured the ′′ mal of the ardent ", the so-called ′′ Saint Anthony fire ", had placed the altar in the sick hall of the convent in Isenheim, Alsace. Not a cheap consolatory vision, not the promise of a happy ending, despite the suffering of the present time, but the image of a God who shares the deadly condition and who, having known annihilation and death, also makes us part of the His glory. That iconographic pattern - Jesus rising in a circle of light showing the sores to the hands, the guards who ramble on the ground in convulsive and violent movements, the shroud that as white takes on the fiery shades of red and yellow - fascinated maybe more than Every other artist of our time. In the th century, German expressionist Otto Dix, opposed by the Nazis as an interpreter of so-called degenerate art, never ceased to confront Gr ünewald. And so the English Graham Sutherland in the tapestry of Christ in Glory made for Coventry Cathedral in 1961 or the 1946 Crucifixion painted for St. Matthew's Church in Northampton, the work of hyperrealism that explicitly refers to the Isenheim Retablo. Not forgetting the French Arcabas, Jean-Marie Pirot's stage name: the 1998 Resurrection, acrylic and gold monumental work destined for Saint-Paul's parish church in Meythet in Upper Savoy, mitigates gr ünewaldian violence, eliminates the contrast between Light and darkness, accentuates the glorious character of the scene, adding a choir of angels around the Risen.

The Escaping Moment of Resurrection

But among the great artists of the past is Rembrandt, more than a century after Gr ünewald, the true revolutionary, with a choice that for a Calvinist rashes the blasphemy: showing the figure of Christ at the time of resurrection. After hesitating and changing his mind several times, the Dutch master finally dares the inosable. In the 1639 canvas now at Monaco Alte Pinakothek, everything is played on the opposition between light and darkness, order and chaos, calm and panic. What we're witnessing is an explosion of dynamite and light. The tombstone is discovered by an angel wrapped in an intense glow. Uncontainable energy that terrorizes soldiers: one tries to protect himself unnecessarily with the shield, the others fall into a rubbish of scraps. We need to dwell for a long time, before we see on the right the figure of Jesus still wrapped in the shroud. As if the artist's uncertainty wasn't completely won. As if the emergence of the Risen from the burial wasn't the center of the scene. But it is precisely this hesitation - or this resistance from the believer Rembrandt to figure out what cannot be figurative - that gives greater strength to the composition. That some people judge messed up, but that mitigates the terror of the sacred with the most humane tremor, the feeling that arises in front of the unheard or never seen. And that doesn't push to close your eyes, but to open them. To Faith and Hope. Rembrandt turns out to be the most modern of the modern ones. Before the Resurrection is represented by Russian Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944), French Alfred Manessier (1911-1993) and other contemporaries such as solar explosion, light wave modulation, big bang of the new creation.

Massimo Rogero

Club President for UNESCO of Genoa

President of Italy Department of International Action Art