In Vittore Carpaccio’s haunting picture Meditation on the Passion of Christ, Jesus is seated on a throne inscribed with Hebrew characters and flanked by two wizened, white-bearded hermits, but is he dead or merely dreaming—playing possum, as it were? It’s impossible to tell, though Catholic doctrine assures us that he died on the cross. The rocky terrain stretches away to the horizon, much of it as lifeless as an ossuary. Much of it also looks brittle or already broken, alluding perhaps to Italian memories of earthquakes, on the fascination with fracture. The people, the ancient ruins, the sparse plants and living creatures—all serving some emblematic function—are packed together so tightly that many impinge on one another, and everything, even the tiniest pebble, has its own hard contour.
The Meditation is not one of Carpaccio’s sublime efforts, like the pictures of Ursula dreaming or Augustine in his study, if only because it’s basically an illustration, and one devoutly crowded with more creatures and objects than any space on our planet could ever actually hold. Still, it’s an illustration forged in the soul of a people—a faith. We’re in a world where even the driest bones and most shriveled trees want to witness, want to prophesy and cry out their warning.
It doesn’t hurt to know who the two emaciated anchorites are on either side of Christ—they are Job and Saint Jerome, as an American scholar discovered only in the 1960s. But it isn’t essential either,
