Caravaggio – Supper at Emmaus

The figure of Jesus in this painting has always seemed to me to be oddly pudgy and feminised, even though he also appears suitably beatific. His full lips and rounded cheeks are suggestive of adolescent puppy fat and have a high, almost cosmetic colour to them too, while his downcast eyes showing those luscious lashes and his long wavy (cenrtre-parted) hair are particularly epicene. The work is a depiction of the account in the New Testament of the dead and now risen Christ making an appearance to two of his disciples, Cleopas and an unnamed companion, who up until this point had not recognised him, until that is, he blesses the food on the table before them. In his superb biography of the artist, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane,  Andrew Graham-Dixon ascribes the artist’s decision to depict Christ so differently from conventional representations to the line in the gospel of Mark which states that Jesus appeared to them ‘in another form’, and cites this as the reason why he is shown beardless. I think the artist took it further than just showing an absence of facial hair and youthfulness (relative to the age of his followers in the painting), and decided, in a radical and possibly blasphemous departure, to suggest that Christ had taken on the form of a plumpish woman.

Caravaggio – Supper at Emmaus, c 1601, oil on canvas, National Gallery, London

Scholars have written much about the symbols and motifs in the painting, some clear, some hidden; from the shadow cast onto the white tablecloth by the basket of fruit forming an icthys, the schematic fish outline drawing by which early Christians recognised one another as believers, to the shadow formed by the head of the standing innkeeper creating a dark halo above Christ’s head. The balding figure with his arms outstretched wears the scallop shell, an anachronistic marker of the way of St James (the Camino di Santiago de Compostella), a sign used on the journey taken by pilgrims as a demonstration of faith. The shell was also a pre-Christian, pagan symbol of rebirth (Botticelli used it in the Birth of Venus). So, the theme is one of recognition and acknowledgement of the divinely reborn in whatever form it might take, of overcoming doubt and of the paltry inadequacy of the ephemeral in contradistinction to the transcendent. The basket of overripe, slightly decaying and spotted fruit threatens to topple to the floor, balanced as it is so close to the edge of the table (a depiction similar to his earlier still-life work, Basket of Fruit), a suggestion of transience, morbidity and a latent fall.

Caravaggio, Basket of Fruit (c. 1599), oil on canvas, Bibliotheca Ambrosiana, Milan

But the grapes and the plums are a symbolic reminder too that Jesus’ blood had flowed, was sacrificed for our salvation, and in conjunction with the bread they form the sacramental basis for the eucharist. Meanwhile, an irreligious cooked chicken, the scaley feet of which protrude so grossly and yet comically from the carcass remind us of ‘…how deep / Was the forgetful kingdom of death’, of what un-resurrected, unqualified death is like. The juxtaposition of temporal and the emblematic stuff on the table spotlights the theological conundrum that Jesus was both human and divine, now at once dead but not dead.

The drama of the painting is amplified by the theatricality of the chiaroscuro lighting and by the attitude and gestures of each figure. The older man on the right almost reaches out of the frame, his highly foreshortened arm creates such a depth of field and the pin-sharp, almost photographic realism of his hand nearest us makes it feel as if we are being drawn in to witness what is happening, that we could step into the room ourselves and ultimately, that we too might share in the miraculous revelation. Graham-Dixon makes the plausible suggestion that the outstretched arms are an echo of the crucifixion and indeed it may be that his gesture is the act of miming the disposition of Christ’s limbs as they were nailed to the cross. In any event, his expansive movement conveys a sense of wonderment not normally to be found in the gestures of an older man. Meanwhile, the figure on the left is hunched forward and about to push himself out of his chair to stand. Their body language conveys the astonishment they are experiencing, but which is not shared by the innkeeper whose nonplussed and slightly sceptical expression and his standing a little uncomfortably, even threateningly close to Christ, tells us that he is perhaps yet to be convinced.

Caravaggio was criticised by some of his contemporaries for what seemed like irreverence in his visualisation of this story. The disciples are not shown as saintly but as slightly scruffy and unkempt. The green jerkin of the one with his back to us is torn at the elbow and the innkeeper persists in wearing his headgear despite the presence of Our Lord Jesus Christ. You can almost smell the sweat of their bodies and the dust of the road that the seated disciples have travelled. How profane to depict disciples in this way! As per Caravaggio’s usual practice, these figures were modelled by real-life sixteenth-century Romans of course, drawn from the working classes and dressed as such in the painting, rather than idealised from imagination, and the artist wants us to believe in the reality of the scene by painting it with as much contemporary verisimilitude as he can. The dishevelment and threadbareness of the figures and their heedless impiety in the presence of God, especially that of the thumbs-in-belt innkeeper, only adds rather than detracts from the authenticity of the narrative we are shown. In modern parlance, they thus become relatable.

None of the figures looks at us and perhaps that is why as viewers we are made to feel more like observers, potential future testifiers as to the truth of the resurrection or deniers of its occurrence. The painting plays with us in this regard: do we feel like the disciples, sharing in their now confirmed belief that Christ is risen, their and our faith rewarded? Or do we feel like the innkeeper, disbelieving that the person before him, dressed in immaculate red and white and with no visible wounds, was ever crucified, that all of this pantomime is nothing more than some clever conjuring trick? Is he even a man at all?

There are a couple of elements in the painting that remain troubling to me. The white cloth jutting out at bottom right, given relative prominence against the darkness surrounding it, appears to sit in the lap of the arms outstretched figure. Is it loosely knotted, perhaps to remind him of something important that he is in danger of forgetting? His faith maybe? And then there is that rip in the green jacket of the other figure, mentioned earlier. Aside from lending credibility, substantiating the concreteness of the wearer’s real material impoverishment, does it also look like a rent in the fabric of the canvas itself, a device to help us see that the illusionistic image is not reality but a construct. Or to put it another way, Caravaggio may be asking us: ‘is seeing believing?’