Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Imagine an eighty-year-old artist
sitting at his easel in a mountain town in Northern Italy,
very preoccupied with ideas for
the Passion of Christ.
And he had been thinking of them as nocturnal scenes, and here instead he’s been asked to turn his mind to a baptism.
In the Baptism of Christ, Bassano conflates these ideas in his mind.
I think that Bassano understood Christ’s acceptance
of the baptism, as being the first step of his
acceptance of death. That dark moment immediately before the dawn…
Christ is bent all the way over, underneath the Baptist’s arm,
almost as if he’s carrying the cross and is on his way to Calvary.
Everything has zeroed in
on the central figure group.
And he starts to move them. Heads move,
arms move,
legs move.
He concentrates so *** this central part of the picture.
The shock of the colors of the angels,
of the red robe,
the burst of the sun rays over the hill.
Watery plants and riverbed at the right,
the hilltop at the left, the mountains in the background--
things are left unfinished
where our attention does not need to be.
And this nocturnal, dark setting,
its sense of foreboding, prepares us for
understanding the last moments in Christ’s life.
Bassano died before this painting was finished.
We should call it non finito,
which was the term to describe paintings that were brought up to
varying levels of finish,
and that showed us the artist’s mind
and hands at work, and that in the end,
were completely satisfying in the way that they were left.
I think his age liberated him, and that he
was working on it for himself. The sense that you feel immediately,
that something completely out of the ordinary is taking place,
that is changing the lives of the participants,
and in a way, of the viewer.