The Flagellation

The painting became part of the Museum with the other works belonging to the rich collection of paintings that the Vicenza noblewoman Paolina Porto Godi left to the Civic Art Gallery (1825-1831).

Here Alessandro Maganza offers an intense and dramatic interpretation of the Flagellation of Christ. The scene is focussed on the essential characters, the victim and his torturers. The figures emerge from the dark background thanks to the light and the thick, opaque colour. The nocturnal atmosphere, obtained with the technique of applying paint on jasper, is illuminated by sudden rapid flashes which, generated by the torch on the right of the painting, light up the bodies of the persecutors and by the glow reverberating from Christ’s halo, white flesh and loincloth.

The skilful relations of light and shade and the colour effects reveal how, after the sixteenth century, a new period opens up in the world of painting, characterised by works filled with rhetoric which no longer reflect an immediate relationship with reality, but which, through measured effects of light and calibrated relations of colour, express “the emotionality of colour and the plasticity of matter” (Villa).

Seventeenth-century painting therefore reflects the inception in the artistic field of a new taste and sensitivity, now far from the results of Renaissance art, that is “from the balance, from the even dramatic and yet always human harmony of classicism” (Villa).