The Mocking of Christ by Fra Angelico

The Mocking of Christ by Fra Angelico

A painting made for one man to pray in front of

In 1437 the convent of San Marco in Florence passed to the Dominicans, and Cosimo de’ Medici paid for its rebuilding. Every friar’s cell on the upper floor received a fresco on one wall — not decoration, and not instruction for the unlettered, but equipment. The friar who slept in the cell was to kneel before the image and meditate on it daily. Fra Angelico, a Dominican himself, painted them in the early 1440s with the help of his workshop.

Cell 7 holds the strangest of them.

What is shown

Christ sits enthroned, blindfolded, holding a reed for a sceptre and an orb — the props of the mock coronation, arranged with the composure of a real one. He is entirely still. Around him, the soldiers who torment him are not there. In their place float a head that spits, a hand that raises a stick, a hand that strikes, a hand that pulls, a hand that holds a hat in derision.

Only the parts that touch him are painted. It is one of the most radical compositional decisions of the fifteenth century, and it was made for an audience of one.

Why the figures are dismembered

The picture is not a reconstruction of an event. It is a picture of someone thinking about an event. Below the throne, out of the scene, sit the Virgin and Saint Dominic — Dominic reading, the Virgin turned away, both in the posture of recollection set out in the Dominican prayer manual De modo orandi. The friar was to copy that posture exactly, down to the hands.

What hangs above them is what they are seeing in their minds: not soldiers, but the facts of the mockery, isolated and held still for examination. The abstraction is the point. Anything more naturalistic would have been a story to watch rather than a subject to enter.

The colour

The palette is the last thing one expects from the subject. Pale green behind the throne, cream, dusty rose, and a single deep red block beneath Christ. There is no violence in the handling at all. Fra Angelico separates what is being done from how it is to be contemplated, and gives the second entirely to the viewer.

About this print

This is the whole fresco, with the Virgin and Saint Dominic seated below the throne.

Sources: Convento di San Marco, Florence · Wikimedia Commons