Vittore Carpaccio

"Studi dal vivo e dal non più vivo": Carpaccio’s Passion Paintings with Saint Job, in Journal of the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York vol. 41, 2006, 75-90

Much of the manifold and painstaking preliminary work is lying concealed behind a completed work of art. Two of Carpaccio’s paintings are being discussed: The Meditation on the Passion (Metropolitan Museum, New York) and The Preparation of Christ’s Tomb (Berlin Gemäldegalerie). Sources of inspiration were the ancient model-books, Carpaccio utilized to represent some of the animals in the background of these paintings. At the same time Carpaccio depicted the figures of Saint Job, which successfully convey the appearance of an aged human body, generally regarded as among the earliest in the history of art. Especially important became anatomical studies of living or deceased models, Carpaccio sketched to prepare convincing motifs of the narrative - as the aged body, the skulls or the visibly decomposed body. Enlarging these studies from nature to a cartoon and then transferring them at full scale onto the canvas or the panel, Carpaccio used the same cartoon for several paintings (see my tracings in black and gray of two different paintings). Such solitary figures are not brought into a spacial unity, but are instead superimposed on the landscape, creating the effect of a “collage avant la lettre” and evoking an almost surrealist and even morbid atmosphere.

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