When Theseus descended into the labyrinth, Ariadne gave him a clue. A clue, in its original sense – sometimes spelled as clew – was a ball of thread or yarn. So long as Theseus, on his mission to kill the Minotaur, used the clue supplied by Ariadne, he would be able to retrace a pathway through the maze by following its thread. We have reached the point in our journey with the Sarpedon krater where reliance upon a clue, or several clues, becomes essential for progress.

It is a truism that in a world full of images, one image is usually begotten by another; or, if not directly generated from the existing stock of images, then somehow indebted to that stock, whether consciously or not. We ‘take a picture’: but anyone who looks at the world through the lens of a camera is already primed by sensory experience of what makes a picture. This process of visual habituation is almost inevitable: only a most rigorous upbringing of solitary confinement, or some concerted programme of memory erasure, would allow a photographer or an artist to see the world truly ‘afresh’.

So far as we know, humans began making symbolic representations in two and three dimensions something like 40,000 years ago. The history of art is therefore relatively recent, if compared to geology; nonetheless what rises from the lower reaches of time can seem overwhelming in its quantity. Faced with the proliferation of images over hundreds, then thousands of years, how can we know when one image gives birth, or shape, to another? In seeking a ‘genealogical’ trail for this image or that, which way should we turn?

Fortunately, there are methods in place. The establishment of methods goes some way to justify the academic study of ‘art history’ as a discipline; how far we want to classify these methods as ‘scientific’ is debatable – but it may be significant that a favoured analogy for reconstructing the afterlife of a particular image comes from the practice of investigation. Again, the literal meaning of the word should be invoked. ‘Vestiges’ are footprints: signs that some creature passed across the earth’s surface. Such tracks may include the actual marks left by feet and paws, but also other give-aways – broken twigs, or a patch of flattened grass. If recognizing these traces is an old human skill that most of us do not practise, then perhaps we will prefer to think of its modernized instance, and consider the metaphor of criminal investigation. The telling details (‘clues’) that lead the officers of justice from the scene of a crime to the perpetrator(s) of that crime can be similarly delicate – and easily overlooked.

It has been remarked that J. D. Beazley, on his lifelong mission to attribute Greek painted vases to the individuals who painted them, was basically motivated by the question of ‘whodunnit?’ – and it may be no coincidence that the rise in popular curiosity about the investigation process, epitomized by the character of Sherlock Holmes, just pre-dates Beazley’s work. The investigation metaphor also proves useful for Aby Warburg, and the art historians who eventually gathered around him at the ‘Warburg Institute’ in Bloomsbury. It was around 1895 that Warburg recognized his disgust for ‘aestheticizing art history’ – the sort of writing about works of art, often rhapsodic in tone, that is exclusively concerned with their ‘beauty’ – and so resolved to seek out the origins of image-making considered rather as a ‘biological necessity’. Warburg was not an anthropologist as such, but he did ‘fieldwork’ (among ‘First Peoples’ in New Mexico) by way of proving his conviction that modern aesthetic responses were grounded in the pre-industrial production of images for religious purposes. Art history then became (as he put it: his fondness for striking metaphor is striking) ‘a ghost story for adults’ – i.e. the process of becoming aware of fundamental forces and spirits that gave rise to symbolic representation in the first place.

Warburg’s followers – among them notably Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich – would refer to the Warburg approach as ‘iconology’: defined (by Gombrich) as ‘the study and interpretation of historical processes through visual images’. Warburg – who never held an academic position, nor ever published a book (he was blessed to be born into a dynasty of bankers) – put it more simply. This was art history as a sort of investigation; it was Detektivarbeit, ‘detective-work’.

To switch the metaphor: regarding any image that belongs to ‘the modern world’ – ‘image’ here need not be an ‘art-work’ as such, and historians will reckon ‘the modern world’ as commencing in 1492, if not before – Warburg’s motto might well have been ‘Achtung: Tiefen’ – ‘Watch out for hidden depths’. Especially relevant for our present purpose is Warburg’s pursuit of one particular manifestation of ghostly presence in images and the ‘afterlife of antiquity’ in European art from the late Middle Ages onwards. This is his concept (or ‘tool’, as he called it) of the Pathosformel. Rendered in English as ‘pathos formula’, the compound term is now relatively well known within academic discourse. Yet it is not straightforward in its application. And almost immediately it raises a question of integrity. ‘Pathos’ designates affect – an aspect of suffering that causes pity or sadness. ‘Formula’ implies some prescribed rule or procedure. For many of us, the sensation of pathos – defined in classical rhetoric as ‘a movement and agitation of the soul’ – is involuntary, ‘moving’, even irrational. How can it be ‘formulaic’ – a matter of fixed rules, pattern or routine? As one commentator (Salvatore Settis) has pointed out, it is precisely this semantic tension that makes Warburg’s Pathosformel such a powerful instrument for the ‘reading’ of images – because it probes beyond description. Warburg did not deny aesthetic effect (nor indeed ‘affect’). He wanted to know how it had been achieved; to gauge the ‘hidden depths’ from which an image drew its aesthetic and psychological power.

Warburg had no access to digital images and ‘Powerpoint’; he does not even seem to have used slides. However, as a devoted book collector, and proprietor of the library that emigrated with him from Hamburg to London in 1933, he felt free to use published illustrations as he pleased. One of his research strategies was to juxtapose pictures: if not by way of photographs and prints, then with his own books, opened out and displayed at the pertinent page. In this way, he constructed a Bilderatlas, or compendium of pictures, which as an experimental project he titled ‘Mnemosyne’, after the classical goddess of ‘Memory’. A series of panels or ‘posters’ (as we would call them) resulted, of which some old photographs survive.

No. 42 of the ‘Mnemosyne’ series is of interest to us (Fig. 61). Warburg left little by way of commentary for this assemblage of images, which taken together do not extend very far in place and time: their sources are all Italian, and broadly they all belong to the Renaissance period. So, what did Warburg want to prove by their juxtaposition? A staccato title, transcribed by his disciple Gertrud Bing, runs as follows: ‘Pathos of suffering in energetic inversion (Pentheus, Maenad at the Cross). Bourgeois death lamentation heroicized. Ecclesiastical death lamentation. Death of the Redeemer. Entombment. Meditation on death.’

These are cryptic captions, which we shall ignore for the time being – because they do not directly answer our question. The unifying principle here is left largely implicit. What these images have in common is that while most of them are Christian by theme and commission, stylistically and compositionally they all appear to relate to a single generic source: ancient pagan sarcophagi.

We looked at one of these sarcophagi in the previous chapter: the logic connecting them with the Sarpedon krater may be recapitulated. Memorandum – the vase itself is definitely out of view: sealed in its Etruscan grave, like Keats’ ‘Grecian Urn’, ‘the foster-child of silence and slow time’, it exerts no direct iconographic influence. But the schematic impact devised by Euphronios is lodged within the classical repertoire, and as such belongs naturally to the relief-registers of the sarcophagi – produced, as noted, by Greek or Greek-trained sculptors within the far-flung economy of the Roman empire. Some sarcophagi were placed in subterranean tombs; but others were kept above ground, in sites of family commemoration throughout Roman Italy (and beyond). What happened to them at the ‘end of antiquity’? (By which we mean, in this context, the Christian transformation of the Roman empire, successive invasions of Italy by foreign forces, and a shift of power from Rome to Byzantium: AD 410, the year when the Visigoth leader Alaric sacked Rome, serves as a convenient date.)

Fig. 61 Photograph of the ‘Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, Tafel 42’, 1925–9. Top left is Donatello’s St Anthony of Padua Healing the Wrathful Son (Padua); bottom left, a drawing by Raphael for his Deposition (British Museum). 1.50 × 2.00 metres (4’ 11” × 6’ 7”). London, Warburg Institute.

The Warburg Institute.

Warburg, fascinated though he was by the stratified ‘archaeology’ of images, seems never to have given much thought to this basic archaeological question – which remains relatively understudied. Impressionistically, however, the evidence suggests that in various parts of Italy, a number of ancient sarcophagi were visible, and given honorary admittance to places of Christian worship. Some simply served as useful building blocks, or water troughs; others, however, were recognized for their original funerary function, and respected accordingly – or even reused in that way. In Viterbo, a young woman called Galiana, whose beauty was the stuff of courtly romance, died prematurely in AD 1135: her grave (its replica still visible in a church façade) was a Roman sarcophagus of late imperial date, showing a particularly spectacular boar hunt that also involved a lion. In Pisa, in the year 1076, a certain contessa Matilda laid her mother to rest in a monument on which the mythological decoration featured the tragic story of Hippolytus and Phaedra. Whether Matilda and her mother knew that story we cannot tell; whether a previous occupant of the coffin had to be ‘evicted’ is not clear; in any case, this sarcophagus was on view, with others, in the Campo Santo area of Pisa – and so it does not seem strange that a sculptor who settled in Pisa during the thirteenth century, and who made a name for himself there (becoming Nicola ‘Pisano’), should take inspiration from such relics.

Another Tuscan, Giorgio Vasari, who several centuries later published his celebrated Lives of the Artists, saw the connection. Vasari’s potted biography of Nicola Pisano (along with his son Giovanni) gives immediate prominence to the influence of ancient sarcophagus-reliefs upon Nicola’s style. Misled by the scene of Hippolytus hunting, Vasari says that the sarcophagus reused by Matilda showed Meleager and the Calydonian boar. But the subject, perhaps, was not so important – rather the exemplary style, the ‘bellissima maniera’ of the carving, which encouraged Nicola to forsake ‘the old Byzantine manner, rough and ill proportioned’ (quella vecchia maniera greca goffa e sproporzionata).

Vasari is open enough about his predilection for classical form; his celebration of artistic excellence must after all culminate with his greatest hero, the ‘divine’ Michelangelo. Yet he has put his finger upon a cardinal process in the history of early modern Europe. ‘The Renaissance had its cradle in a grave.’ This aphorism was coined by one of Warburg’s friends, the Dutch cultural historian André Jolles, apropos of Pisano’s resort to Roman sarcophagi. As Jolles admitted, it was a somewhat reckless claim. And yet it encapsulates a truth about the particular iconographic trail we are following. Even without Vasari’s testimony, we can see that Nicola Pisano – and his son Giovanni – adapted figures on surviving Roman sarcophagi to serve in Christian themes for grandiose marble pulpits in Tuscan cathedrals. The brooding figure of Phaedra from Matilda’s sarcophagus, originally dating to the second century AD, supplied a stolid Madonna in Nicola’s Adoration of the Magi for the Baptistery in Pisa (1260); and the sort of turbid violence captured upon a typical Roman ‘battle sarcophagus’ must have inspired Giovanni’s Massacre of the Innocents at Pistoia c. AD 1300. This ‘new-old style’ evidently found favour, for in the next generation, the two pre-eminent Florentine sculptors, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Donatello, borrowed likewise. For Ghiberti, it is judged that ancient sarcophagi provided him above all with a broad repertoire of figures in action: ‘dancers, nude youths and running girls, goddesses with windblown garments, men carrying loads, figures writhing in sorrow or exuberant with bacchantic joy’. From his own Commentaries we know how much Ghiberti esteemed classical models, theoretically: but we should bear in mind that actual samples of such models were not then abundant. Vasari, in the mid-sixteenth century, was aware of that archaeological fact: all the more credit to Donatello, then, that he had absorbed lessons from antiquity at a time when ‘antiquities were hardly yet brought to the surface’.

Vasari’s account implies that it was the stylistic accomplishment exemplified by relics of classical sculpture that enchanted artists of the trecento and quattrocento, and propelled them, technically, towards emulation. At the risk of being too ‘down to earth’, we may mention an even more fundamental motive for resorting to classical schemes. Donatello, for example, was commissioned to decorate a high altar for the basilica at Padua, dedicated to St Anthony. It was natural enough that Donatello used the form of the altar as a space to make visual statements not only about the rite of the Eucharist but also relating to the sanctitude of Anthony, a Franciscan priest canonized in 1232, not long after his death. Those coming to the altar were invited to meditate upon the body of Christ as a ‘real presence’: reason enough for the sculptor to imagine what it might have been like, once upon a time, when Christ’s body was taken down from the Cross and prepared for entombment (Fig. 62). But had he, the artist, ever witnessed such a scene? Its verbal description as an event, in sacred literature, provided scant imaginative detail. In such situations, models are required. Entrusted with the same subject, subsequent artists (notably Hans Holbein) proved not averse to having an actual corpse laid out in their studio. An alternative option was to use models from the past – ‘second hand’ they might be, but at least they were impeccable at keeping still. Though we cannot identify his sources precisely, Donatello seems to have taken this latter course. Stereotypically, in the group he assembles, there are several males, intent on laying out the body; while in the background, female onlookers display the gesticulations of grief – shrieking, raising their arms, tearing their hair. The inspiration was surely some Meleager sarcophagus. As for certain miracles wrought by St Anthony, although they were attested as relatively recent events, the sculptor ‘quoted’ the architectural remains of Rome in the ‘wide-angle’ settings he created – so before a background of imperial Roman barrel vaults, a donkey obliges the saint by kneeling in acknowledgement of the sacrament of Holy Communion; and Donatello draws (literally?) from the style of classical sarcophagi when he shows Anthony kneeling to mend the leg of a young man who had cut off his own foot, in a fit of remorse – remorse for having kicked his mother.1

Fig. 62 Donatello, Deposition, 1445–49. The Biblical accounts of this event are perfunctory: St John’s Gospel (19. 38–42) mentions just two individuals (Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus), binding Christ’s body with strips of linen soaked in myrrh and aloes. Padua, Sant’Antonio.

It is important to note here that a stylistic choice is being made. At Padua, it might have been obvious enough. The frescoes by Giotto for the Arena Chapel, consecrated in 1305, displayed that painter’s genius in many ways – and Giotto, too, is thought to have studied some ancient reliefs – yet the style is manifestly more Byzantine than classical. And reasonably so, since the tableau generically termed ‘Pietà’, showing Christ’s body taken down from the Cross, is indebted to a Byzantine liturgical tradition of ‘Funerary Lament’ (Epitaphios Thrênos). North of the Alps, meanwhile, Gothic visions of the ‘Sorrowful Mother’ nursing the bloodied and broken body of her grown son became part of devotional worship – as exemplified by the well-known ‘Röttgen Pietà’ (c.1325). The classical option requires something different. Christ must be imagined not as a physical wreck, but a fine figure of youth, grace and athletic muscularity. This is the Christ who will appear in the young Michelangelo’s version of the Pietà c.1498–1500, on display at St Peter’s; in other words, the Christ who looks like Sarpedon.

Fig. 63 Detail of a Roman marble sarcophagus-lid once in Palazzo Sciarra, Rome (from an old photograph). Previously attested in the church of Saints Bonifacio and Alessio on the Aventine. Late second century AD. 29 × 227 cm (11” × 7’ 5”). Whereabouts unknown.

after Koch 1975, pl. 84.

While Donatello was working on these reliefs at Padua, a young painter called Andrea Mantegna will have witnessed the work, and absorbed its lessons. Mantegna was the apprentice and adoptive son of Francesco Squarcione, a pioneer of the craft of taking plaster casts from ancient sculptures: so it is no surprise that Mantegna continues the creative rapport with classical reliefs, developing a monochrome grisaille technique for mimicking their effect in two dimensions. More important, however, was the theorizing intervention of the archetypal ‘Renaissance man’ himself, Leonbattista Alberti. In 1435 Alberti published a short treatise ‘On Painting’ (De Pictura). Having shown that he could write (and elegantly so) in Latin, the following year he produced an Italian version, which in its dedication to fellow-architect Filippo Brunelleschi alludes to their mutual friend Donatello, and cordially also to Ghiberti (by his nickname, ‘Nencio’). Implicitly Alberti acknowledges that both sculptors, along with Luca della Robbia, had already narrowed the gap between sculpture and painting. And what Alberti had to say about the use of ancient sarcophagi implies that painters, conversely, should take lessons from the genre of relief sculpture (bassorilievo). In a quotable passage, Alberti alludes to a relief that he knows of in Rome. ‘Much-praised,’ he says, ‘it shows the dead Meleager being carried, and weighing upon those who take the load. It seems each one of his limbs is stone dead [ben morto]; every part droops – hands, fingers, head – every part hangs languidly; and you see clearly how difficult it is, to represent a dead body… – all the limbs of a corpse must appear dead, right down to the fingernails.’

Several sarcophagi showing the Meleager story were demonstrably visible in Rome during Alberti’s sojourn in the city, c.1430 – including the sarcophagus in Palazzo Doria Pamphilj (see Fig. 58), and another one in the Palazzo Barberini, now in Brazil; or he may be referring to one that has since disappeared (Fig. 63).2 In any case – and this is partly the point of our argument – one Meleager sarcophagus tends to look rather like another; and all (as our argument runs) ultimately derive from the Sarpedon motif – where, as we have noted, the gravitational momentum of Sarpedon’s morbid weight is visibly registered in the figures of those carrying the corpse (see p. 118). The visual message is clear: that a dead body makes an awkward burden – and this seems to be the realism that Alberti approves. Yet Alberti does not recommend that artists commissioned to represent dead bodies go with their sketchbooks to visit a morgue. Forensic accuracy is not the aim. Rather, Alberti prescribes the study of ancient models as a guide for how to convey, in images, a convincing istoria.

Alberti’s Italian here sounds like Latin – historia: but we realize immediately that to translate istoria as ‘history’ will not work, if it applies to a myth or fable such as that of Meleager. ‘Story’, too, is not quite right. Modern academic usage would probably prefer ‘narrative’ – but Alberti’s use of the term istoria is so idiosyncratic that some translators simply leave it as such. Whatever we choose, the advice from Alberti is unambivalent. Whether an artist was depicting a classical myth, or an event from Roman history, or a scene from the Passion of Christ, the priority must be to make it convincing – for the sake of aesthetic and emotive effect. An istoria contains a certain mode of truth, at once particular and universalizing. It is the artist’s task to create the visual coherence necessary to deliver that truth.

Like a theatrical director, Alberti suggests certain principles of staging: for example, he does not like scenes that are too empty, nor scenes that are too busy and over-crowded. His fundamental demand is for a thinking-through of details – to an almost pedantic degree. For example, if a painter is showing a battle involving Centaurs, which as an istoria occurs after a banquet at which the Centaurs have become drunk – then in a scene of this melee there should be no jugs of wine still standing: disorder must be complete.

In citing a Meleager relief as exemplary of such ‘convincingness’, Alberti was not advocating the sort of copying that would later result in frigid neoclassicism – the style of a Canova or a Flaxman. As a ‘humanist’ of the mid-quattrocento Florentine milieu, he regarded the evident and reported achievements of classical antiquity as a challenge: touchstones of excellence, to be emulated, and matched – but also surpassed. As it happens – and partly as a result of Alberti’s text, which circulated widely even before the formal growth of ‘art schools’ around Europe – artists who visited Rome from c.1500 onwards did make careful studies (though not always faithful copies) of scenes upon ancient sarcophagi (Figs. 64 and 65), as if satisfying a requirement of their apprenticeship. But replicating the past was not an end in itself; nor would Alberti and his followers have been troubled by the crime we call ‘plagiarism’. Alberti did not directly anticipate Warburg’s analysis of images that were ‘formulaic’ or ‘schematic’. He did, nonetheless, recognize established patterns of response, as much subject to physical laws as matters of planes, perspective and proportion. The classical literature about artists such as Pheidias and Apelles made it clear that those masters had wrestled with the technical challenges of representing what was beautiful, marvellous and ‘moving’. Classical relics were object-lessons accordingly.

The most celebrated example of an artist implementing Alberti’s advice must be Raphael’s ‘Deposition’, or ‘Entombment’ (Fig. 66). The commission of this painting is an istoria in itself, involving the violent death of a young man and a grief-stricken mother (who happened to be called Atalanta). Its composition appears to heed Albertian strictures about numbers of figures (about eight or nine), and the ideal mix of age and gender among them; and from a series of drawings – which one would call ‘preparatory sketches’, if they were not so exquisitely executed – we see how Raphael worked towards a visual choreography that would make sense as an altarpiece, and also as memorial within the chapel of a recently bereaved family. There is little doubt that Raphael, in gathering the ‘concepts’ he needed for the eventual picture, resorted to an antique sarcophagus showing Meleager or something similar. It is a sign of Raphael’s artistic ingenuity, however, that no particular sarcophagus can be identified from any of the drawings (Fig. 67).

Fig. 64 Detail from a sketchbook (‘London I’) of ‘Amico’ Aspertini, c.1533: apparently a motif from a Meleager sarcophagus (it may be the piece illustrated in Fig. 63). Aspertini was in Rome around the same time as Raphael, and made numerous drawings from antiquities then visible. Pen, ink and wash on vellum. London, British Museum 1898.1123.3 (7).

By Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 65 Pencil drawing of a detail from a Meleager sarcophagus in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj, Rome, by G. D. Campiglia, c.1710–30. (This sarcophagus is not to be confused with that in Palazzo Doria.) Eton College Library Bm 8.50.

Reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.

Fig. 66 Deposition: oil on wood, by Raphael, 1507. We do not know the title of the picture – it is strictly speaking neither ‘Deposition’ nor ‘Entombment’, but a moment in between – only that it was originally painted for the Baglioni family chapel in the church of San Francesco al Prato, Perugia. 1.84 × 1.76 metres (6’ 1” × 5’ 9”). Rome, Galleria Borghese.

What Raphael extracted from the sarcophagi was the impression of movement around a motionless object. The two foreground figures lifting the body of Christ – one of them a muscular young man – are braced as if hauling up some solid joist; a senior man, presumably Joseph of Arimathea, assists, casting a worried glance to the viewer – to remind us, perhaps, that this is a covert operation, which has to be done swiftly. The right arm of the corpse dangles down, in the leitmotiv we have identified as ‘the arm of death’. Bands of cloth discreetly cover those parts of the body which it would be improper (at the time, and in a church) to represent – but the basic contrast of a horizontal stripped body among a vertical draped entourage, which Raphael may have seen on a sarcophagus preserved at Perugia (Fig. 68), is striking enough.

Fig. 67 Pen and ink study for the ‘Deposition’, by Raphael, c.1507. Some sixteen drawings survive as studies for the painting. Insofar as their chronological sequence can be determined, the early, more ‘static’ compositions place the figure of Christ upon the ground, lying left to right, with attendant figures variously lamenting. As the series develops, the body is lifted up, its direction reversed, and diagonal agitation introduced (with Mary the mother of Jesus falling back in a faint). H 21.3 cm (8 in). London, British Museum 1963.1216.3.

By Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 68 Detail of a late second-century AD sarcophagus, once kept at the Abbey of Farfa, in the Sabine Hills. H of sarcophagus 92 cm (3 feet). Perugia, Museo Archeologico Nazionale dell’Umbria 1886.

Raphael’s senior contemporary Luca Signorelli must also have looked at such sarcophagi, for he gratifyingly depicts one, in grisaille, in the background of an image placed in a niche-annexe of his best-known work, the San Brizio chapel for Orvieto cathedral (Fig. 69). Christ is about to be placed in a tomb: given the absolute chronology of the Crucifixion, why should it not be a Roman-style sarcophagus? Signorelli is content to isolate a few figures on the sarcophagus: he gives the dead figure a beard, but otherwise his ‘source’ is taken to be a Meleager relief (and is catalogued as such, though no original monument has been located).

While he was working on his fresco-programme for Orvieto, Signorelli also undertook to paint a large altarpiece for a church in his home town of Cortona. This is described as a ‘Lamentation at the Foot of the Cross’: beyond two basic objects in the foreground – a skull and a hammer – the semi-naked body of Christ is prominent, with elaborately robed figures in the background variously grieving or grave of demeanour (Fig. 70). Thanks to the modern ease of comparing images, it is clear that Signorelli has economized his artistic effort, and effectively reversed a cartoon to serve at both Cortona and Orvieto: not only the body of Christ, but also the figures of the Virgin and Mary Magdalene. No shame in so doing: but some commentators have wanted to relate the Cortona picture to a story in Vasari (who could remember meeting Signorelli as a boy), telling how Signorelli suffered the loss of a son at Cortona. Vasari relays the anecdote that the artist, pained yet refraining from tears, had the boy’s body stripped, and made a full-length portrait ‘of what nature had given, and harsh fate taken away’.

Fig. 69 Detail of a fresco by Luca Signorelli in the chapel of Saints Faustino and Pietro Parenzo, within the Capella San Brizio of Orvieto Duomo, 1499–1504. Figures of the eponymous martyrs flank a scene of Christ lamented by his mother (background) and Mary Magdalene.

Fig. 70 Lamentation at the Foot of the Cross by Signorelli, 1501–2. Oil on wood, 2.70 × 2.40 metres (8’ 10” × 7’ 10”). Cortona, Museo Diocesano.

Did this portrait of the dead son (named Antonio) furnish a model for the dead Christ? That suggestion, made long ago, has been discounted on the basis of documentary evidence, indicating that Luca Signorelli consigned his Cortona altarpiece in February 1502, and that his son Antonio died (probably of plague) later that year. Disregarding such evidence, however, there is another problem here – perhaps obvious only to those viewers who know about gymnasium culture. The body of Christ in this picture is no ‘natural’ body. Like Michelangelo’s Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, it is the configuration of a classical athlete or hero. Antonio Sigorelli may have been a fine young man: but he is historically unlikely to have possessed such muscular bulk and definition – especially if he had suffered the wasting effects of an epidemic disease. In this sense, Vasari’s story is unbelievable. The Christ of Signorelli’s ‘Lamentation’ is based upon no ‘real-life’ model, but rather draws upon the heroic somatotype embodied by Sarpedon as projected by Euphronios.

Many subsequent artists, whether they followed Alberti’s advice directly or else simply the trend it created, undertook to represent the body of Christ as medically dead: among them Titian (Louvre), Rosso Fiorentino (Sansepolcro), Pontormo (Florence), and Vasari himself (Arezzo). Protagonists of the ‘baroque’, such as Caravaggio (Vatican), followed in their way. But perhaps, at this point, it is worth reminding ourselves of the ‘visual DNA’ at work here. A gift to Warburg’s project – though not known to him, and kept in the museum of a minor town in the Alban Hills southeast of Rome – is a small but remarkable marble relief generically classified as an oscillum (Fig. 71). Such circular plaques would once have been suspended within the peristyle walkways of a Roman villa (see e.g. the House of the Telephus Relief at Herculaneum). But one could be forgiven for not recognizing it as a piece of Graeco-Roman sculpture.

Originally this tondo showed the sort of scheme we have already encountered in various media (see Figs. 54–6). Two warriors bear the naked body of a casualty, with an elderly bearded figure, probably paternal, in attendance. One of the warriors is also unclothed, the other wears a short tunic; both were evidently once shown as helmeted. Then the piece was reworked by a sculptor of the late Renaissance. The elaboration was not extensive, yet it was sufficient to alter effect and significance. Chiselling around the heads of the three vertical figures, the later artist contrived to give each one a halo. Thus was the pagan image Christianized: a ‘Deposition’ conjured from the iconographic detritus of classical antiquity.

Fast forward to the French Revolution. In July 1793, a popular protagonist of the Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat, was murdered – in his bath. It was a singular case of homicide. The victim was in the bath to soothe a skin complaint, and doing his paperwork there; the assassin was a genteel lady armed with a kitchen knife. One of Marat’s friends was the painter Jacques-Louis David, who undertook to depict the event. Though David had Marat’s body embalmed and put on public view, there was an obvious problem about the undertaking of a picture. How could such a bizarre death be rendered in a convincing yet aesthetically pleasing way?

Fig. 71 Marble relief from Velletri (found built into a wall of Palazzo Graziosi). Original perhaps early first century AD; reworked in the early sixteenth century? D. 51.5 cm (1’ 8”). Velletri, Museo Civico 405.

Francesco Rinaldi.

David, working swiftly, had the picture finished within several months – and it is judged one of his masterpieces (Fig. 72). The artist is applauded for the innovative boldness with which he has broached a contemporary subject. But the apparent immediacy of the representation conceals – as readers, at this stage, will guess – ‘hidden depths’. David’s mission is to heroicize Marat. To do so, the painter need not have witnessed the actual scene in Marat’s bathroom. Better that he consult the sketchbooks from his sojourn in Rome. During his artistic apprenticeship, David tried several times for the Prix de Rome, which provided a studio-residency at the Villa Medici. Eventually he was successful, and spent five years immersed among images of the antique. There was (and is) part of a Meleager sarcophagus at the Villa Medici – but David doubtless studied others too (Fig. 73). That experience supplied him with as much as he needed here. The posture of the limp right arm is enough to signal Marat as the classical hero – a person of outstanding virtue; a man whose loss will be widely lamented.

Musicians speak of a leitmotiv – a short recurrent phrase, the ‘leading motif’ of a piece. Warburg liked to invoke, in visual terms, the leitfossil – a ‘leading relic’, which in the case of David’s Marat will be the braccio della morte. For our purposes (and Warburg’s) it is all the same, whether or not David was conscious of the classical element in his ‘contemporary’ scene. The Sarpedon-fossil has exerted its remote formulaic force.

Is it merely ‘academic’ to draw attention to this formal debt? For some viewers, a more basic problem is simmering here. A French painter of neo-classical formation has drawn on the classical canon to invest a representation of a squalid and violent event with some sort of atavistic nobility. But does that change the fact that we are regarding as a ‘masterpiece’ the image of a fellow human murdered in his bath? If we like this picture – must we be sadists?

Fig. 72 The Death of Marat (detail), by Jacques-Louis David, 1793. Oil on canvas. 1.65 × 1.28 metres (5’ 5” × 4’ 2”). Brussels, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts.

Fig. 73 ‘Death of Meleager’: sketch by Jacques-Louis David, c. 1775–80. Pen and wash over charcoal. 13.9 × 21.3 cm (5.5 × 8.4 in). Paris, Louvre 26084 Bis.

Not long before David created the painting, that problem of aesthetic gratification had gained some prominence in salons of the learned – thanks largely to an essay published in 1766 by the German critic and dramatist Gotthold Lessing. The essay was entitled Laocoon, but it was not really focused upon the famous Graeco-Roman statue of that name. Rather, Lessing was attacking the intellectual and aesthetic basis of modern esteem for the statue. He had in his sights J. J. Winckelmann, for whom the Laocoon-group in the Vatican represented a glorious statement of classical grace and control. Lessing’s essay is peevish and pedantic, and it was as a poet that he argued for poetry’s superiority as a medium of expression. But one of his polemical points still seems sharp. The Laocoon-group shows a man and his sons being crushed and bitten to death by a pair of giant serpents. That ought to be a terrible and revolting sight. So why is it such an uplifting work of art – if it really conveys what it claims to represent?

We noted (see p. 69) Aristotle’s elementary observation that humans in general derive pleasure from looking at the representation of something terrible – such as a monster, or a painful death – because it is a successful representation. The pleasure here lies in the act of mimêsis, ‘imitation’, done with such skillful care (akribeia) that it is convincing. But Aristotle’s analysis is not as useful as it might seem. On the Sarpedon krater, what exactly is being ‘accurately’ represented? Is it a maimed casualty of violent combat – or rather the body of a superhuman warrior, still amazingly taut when lifted horizontally?

We know that photographs are not necessarily ‘accurate’ as representations. But one way of approaching the problem of aesthetic gratification from ‘distressing’ images may be to consider how instances of photojournalism can achieve, within the genre, ‘classic’ status. A number of pictures taken by Larry Burrows during the Vietnam War have this status, and one of them seems broadly comparable to what is shown on the Sarpedon krater (Fig. 74).

The prime intended viewers of this image were readers of a popular weekly called Life: what they saw was someone close to death. Some would say that here is the key: we see danger, trauma, death, at a remove – and feel pleasure, or gratitude, from the fact that it is not happening to us. This is not sadism, but it may be a sort of schadenfreude – the ‘damage-joy’ that can explain why we laugh at a film-sequence of someone falling off a ladder. ‘C’est effrayant, la vie’ – ‘life is terrifying’: Cézanne’s habitual refrain becomes a truth that we all know, but generally hate to admit.

Fig. 74 ‘Four marines recover the body of a fifth as their company comes under fire near Hill 484. Vietnam, October 1966.’ Photograph by Larry Burrows for Life magazine. Another photographer, Catherine Leroy, is in the background. (Burrows died in a helicopter crash in 1971.)

Larry Burrows/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images. Other images: the author, or archives of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge.

There is another explanation. It derives from research to which neither Aristotle nor Lessing were privy: the advances being made in the sphere of neuroscience, and in particular our understanding of how the human brain operates emotional and aesthetic responses. Aristotle recognized that the dramatic spectacle of tragedy caused engaged reactions among its viewers, for whom the experience ideally induced a sort of emotive ‘purge’ or catharsis. But why and how do we engage with the virtual reality of dramatic or artistic representation? A number of neurophysiologists currently devote their time to this problem; and while it is premature to state their results as definitive, a reasonable theory has emerged. This proposes that empathy – the sensation of involvement with the feelings of another person – is a natural and involuntary act; a cognitive mechanism. So, we see someone suffering – or an image of someone suffering – and this activates ‘mirror neurons’ within our brain to simulate a response, as if that suffering were ours.

Evidence for this mechanism came to the fore in therapeutic treatments for a particular post-surgical problem. A patient has lost a limb, and gained a prosthetic replacement. How does the complex neurophysiological system of nerve-endings and muscular reflexes reactivate, to make that new limb functional? Part of the rehabilitation consists in viewing the performance of a movement or gesture. The patient watches someone else make the action: the mirror neurons in the patient’s brain send the message to act likewise.

This phenomenon of ‘embodied simulation’ has obvious implications for how we respond to works of art. People rarely shed tears in front of pictures. Yet, as David Freedberg (art historian) and Vittorio Gallese (neuroscientist) jointly claim, ‘physical empathy easily transmutes into a feeling of empathy for the emotional consequences of the ways in which the body is damaged or mutilated’. To see a photograph of a dying or seriously wounded soldier being carried by his comrades is therefore not only to ‘feel’ for the casualty: it is also to read the panic, determination and anxiety in the expressions of those who are rushing for help. It is moreover to wonder about those we cannot see, who will be close to the casualty – and to imagine the reactions when the body-bag appears at a family home.

So, in scenes of ‘Deposition from the Cross’, artists may almost prescribe or anticipate a viewer’s response. The body of Christ is gathered: his mother falls down in a swoon; other onlookers cannot control their weeping. And so, on the sarcophagi that show the dead or dying Meleager brought home, there are all the outward signs of emotional distress – heads bowed, mouths howling, arms raised, hair and clothes awry. Of course, there are cultural and contextual factors here. But it seems to be basic biology that underpins Warburg’s notion of a Pathosformel – ‘an antique superlative of the language of gestures’.

We have, as they say, come a long way with Sarpedon: only to find, in the end, that he is one of us.

1 Warburg would have recognized here a nice case of ‘energetic inversion’ with the pathos formula: that is, while the classical repertoire included scenes of Bacchic frenzy leading to dismemberment, indeed of a son by his mother (i.e. the fate of Pentheus depicted on the psykter in Fig. 2), here the dramatic composition has been adapted for the opposite action: a dismembered body part restored.

2 The Palazzo Barberini sarcophagus, reportedly from the church of S. Maria in Monticelli, was sketched by numerous artists. São Paulo, Museu de Arte Assis Chateaubriand, inv. 441 E.