rubenista: Hieronymus Bosch, Ecce Homo (detail), 1475-1485. Tempera and oil on oak panel, 

rubenista:

Hieronymus Bosch, Ecce Homo (detail), 1475-1485. Tempera and oil on oak panel, 71 cm × 61 cm. Städel Museum, Frankfurt.

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In the 2016 documentary “Exhibition on Screen: The Curious World of Hieronymus Bosch,” they pointed out a detail I never noticed in this Ecce Homo: Christ’s bloody footprint.

Although this is a painting and not a photograph, it reminds me of the idea of the “punctum” of a photo as “that… which pricks me… bruises me, it poignant to me” (1). Roland Barthes went on to talk about how “while remaining a “detail,” it fills the whole picture,” and has “a power of expansion” (2). For early modern viewers of this painting, it’s possible to imagine how this footprint (and the detail of the cuts on Christ’s legs, which were depicted by a number of Northern painters, including as Matthias Grünewald in the early 16th-century Isenheim Altarpiece) would function as a visceral reminder of the pain Christ endured.

Throughout the early modern West, graphic and emotional images of Christ suffering (like this one) were produced for religious settings as well as private ones, where they could serve as personal devotional objects. Titian’s intimate 1547 Ecce Homo and Veronese’s 1584-1585 Christ Crowned with Thorns both depict Christ in a red cape or robe, his eyes lowered as blood drips down his face.

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1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27.

2. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 45.