Our Gospels tell us very little of the post-Passion appearances of Jesus. In compensation for the dearth of anecdote, artists have seized that encounter on the road to Emmaus. A popular motif for centuries, it challenges artists to picture a revelation at once quotidian and sublime. Few have met that challenge with the power and subtlety of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.
Christians profess faith in Jesus as True God and True Man, his humanity and divinity indivisible. That faithful unity loses something of its purity in the effort of depiction. It is no easy thing for Western verisimilitude to suggest “the radiance of the glory of God,” as Paul states in Hebrews 1:3, without tilting the Incarnate Word into something dewy and ethereal, making human flesh a costume rather than—Paul again—“the exact imprint of his nature.” Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus reminds us that the resurrected Christ and the Galilean man are one.
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Caravaggio. Supper at Emmaus (1601).
Caravaggio painted two renditions of the theme. The first (1601, above) hangs in the National Gallery, London. The second, painted five years later, is in the Brera, Milan. Completed while he was on the lam from Rome for having murdered a well-known pimp, the 1606 variation (below) is subdued. Gestures are restrained, color is understated, the table cleared of all but bread and wine, elements of the Eucharist. Atmosphere is darksome, the Christ figure more conventional. Its greater solemnity brings Caravaggio’s unflinching realism—not customary at the time—within the orbit of traditional patterns of depiction.
Yet it is the earlier work that conveys the drama of that instant of recognition with greater potency. And particular earthiness.
