EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Getting Dressed for the Last Supper

True art, Oscar Wilde said, is “the soul made incarnate”, a proposition with which EPPH agrees. The mind, rid of the ego and its daily obsessions, is the soul. If great art depicts the creator’s soul at the moment of the work’s conception, as we say here, then what we see is his inner world clothed in the material bodies of his external one. Of course, to do that, the artist would have to strip (or purify) his mind first and then get dressed again in someone else’s clothes.

Perhaps that’s why Tintoretto focusses on the disciples getting dressed and undressed when Christ washes their feet before the Last Supper. They do so not because the biblical story demands it - it does not - but because his mental process does. He strips his mind and then clothes his soul. That could be why the leg and leggings of the man stripping form a Y-shaped Cross. Christ on the Cross has always symbolized the human mind purified. The outward, as Oscar also said, has been made to express the inward.¹

 

1. "De Profundis" in The Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. G. F. Maine (New York: E. P. Dutton) 1954, p. 864