History painting · 04 / 11
How Can Exaggerated Bodies Make a Miracle Believable?
Marco Pino’s The Raising of Lazarus: Looking at Mannerism through the Senses and Gesture
English translation of Art Value Lab’s Chinese guide.
Look first, then read
One person pinches his nose; another stretches out a hand in astonishment. Why might these seemingly minor actions matter more than the miracle itself?
Pause and find the details that support your interpretation.
Begin reading01Find the Sensory Clues
Begin with the gesture of covering the nose and the color of Lazarus’s skin. Consider how the painting makes you imagine the physical condition of his body.
02Trace the Hands
Follow the gestures of Christ, Lazarus, and the older man behind them, finding a verb for each action: summoning, responding, questioning, or marveling.
03Compare Viewing Distances
Compare the Ravenna mosaic with Pino’s painting. Which makes you feel you are contemplating a symbol, and which makes you feel you are standing within a crowd?
Confronted with The Raising of Lazarus, you may first feel that there are too many people and too much movement. Someone supports a grayish body, someone covers his nose, and someone spreads his hands. Folds of drapery and arms intersect within the narrow picture. You do not need to identify everyone yet. Let these different reactions bring you closer to what is happening.
Marco Pino, a sixteenth-century artist from Siena, worked in Rome’s artistic milieu before becoming active in Naples. His painting invites us to practice looking without rushing to judge whether something is “natural.” Carefully designed, even apparently exaggerated, poses can be an effective language for communicating emotion and ideas.
Death Must First Be Believable for Resurrection to Matter
The Gospel of John recounts that, after Lazarus dies, Jesus travels to Bethany, where Lazarus lived with his sisters Martha and Mary. Because the dead man has been buried for four days, Martha worries about the smell in the tomb. Jesus orders the stone to be removed, calls Lazarus to come out, and then tells those nearby to undo the grave clothes. The story’s tension comes from a difficult question: how can the immediate experience of death meet belief in resurrection?
Pino brings this difficulty into the body. Lazarus’s grayish flesh, the cloth beside the tomb, and the supporting figure’s gesture of pinching his nose together indicate that this is no ordinary recovery from illness. A painting cannot give off a smell, but it can depict someone smelling one. When viewers infer a cause from a reaction, an invisible sensory experience becomes narrative evidence for the miracle.
Read Each Pair of Hands as a Sentence
At the center of the painting, Christ’s gesture conveys a command and a summons, while Lazarus’s outstretched hands express response and dependence. The older man behind them can be identified, following tradition, as Peter. His raised hands suggest both astonishment and an effort to understand. These gestures do not turn everyone into a single chorus of celebration. Instead, they distribute acceptance, confusion, care, and hesitation among different figures.
The two sisters on the left respond bodily to their brother’s return to life. The young man holding a book is identified as John the Evangelist by the eagle depicted on it. His presence connects the event to the text that records it. Another face in the back row turns toward the viewer, as though drawing us into the position of witnesses. There is not enough evidence, however, to establish whether it is a self-portrait of the artist or a portrait of the patron.
Why Not Make the Figures Look More Natural?
Pino’s elongated proportions, twisting torsos, and compressed space are often understood in the context of “Mannerism.” This later art-historical term refers to a group of works after the High Renaissance that value elegance, complex poses, and sophisticated design. If we judge them only by whether their bodies would be comfortable in everyday life, we risk missing the expressive power the artist deliberately pursued.
Compare Michelangelo’s David and Victory. The former balances the body’s weight in a standing pose, while the latter makes the torso and limbs turn in more complex ways. This twisting movement, resembling the letter S, is often called a serpentine pose. Pino’s Lazarus, with one leg extended and the other bent, can also be compared with Victory. The visual echo may give the resurrection a sense of “victory over death,” without requiring us to claim that every detail of the two works corresponds.
How Many Viewing Distances Can One Miracle Offer?
In the mosaic of The Raising of Lazarus in Ravenna, there are few figures and the background is simple. The wrapped body and Christ’s action are enough to convey the central event. Set beside Pino’s painting, it reveals how many more onlookers with different reactions the later work introduces. The difference concerns more than the quantity of detail. It is also about how viewers approach the subject: by contemplating an emblem of faith, or by entering a concrete human event.
Pino inherits these visual conventions, yet brings gestures and bodies into a denser exchange. Comparing works helps us distinguish “what the story requires” from “what the painter chooses.” Making the raising of Lazarus recognizable does not require the same number of people, terrain, poses, or viewing angle. Each new depiction rearranges the relationship between the viewer and the miracle.
How Does a Complex Surface Establish a Clear Center?
Look again at Pino’s painting and try moving your gaze along the figures’ arms and folds of drapery. Undulating lines connect separate bodies into a rhythm, while a larger triangular arrangement keeps the dense movements from scattering completely. These relationships lead the eye back to the hands converging at the center: Christ gives the command, Lazarus receives life, and the onlookers struggle to understand. Composition turns an abstract belief into a visible exchange.
Within the artistic culture of the period, ingenious artifice could be an achievement worthy of admiration. Borrowing the poses of earlier masters could also display an artist’s learning to knowledgeable viewers. The question, then, is not simply whether a painter is showing off, but what the technique accomplishes. Pino organizes many actions around a shared focus, bringing both the miracle’s credibility and the artist’s creative power into view.
A short glossary
Key terms
- Mannerism
- A term often used for certain sixteenth-century art that emphasizes sophisticated design, elongated bodies, and complex poses. It means more than simply “painting unnaturally.”
- Serpentine Pose
- A pose in which different parts of the body twist in different directions, creating an approximately S-shaped movement that combines fluidity with technical difficulty.
- Visual Convention
- A visual device that viewers can learn to recognize, such as an eagle identifying John the Evangelist, or a tomb and grave clothes identifying the story of Lazarus.
Your turn to reflect
If the onlookers pinching their noses, exclaiming, and showing confusion were removed, leaving only Christ and Lazarus, what would the painting lose?
Consider another perspective
The miracle would still be recognizable, but viewers would lose some of the steps that help them understand it. The different reactions make the reality of death, the astonishment of witnessing, and the difficulty of belief concrete. The onlookers inside the painting also rehearse several ways of looking for those of us outside it.
Take this question into your next encounter with art
Exaggeration does not necessarily weaken a narrative. When poses, gazes, and composition work together, deliberate artifice can turn beliefs that are difficult to express into experiences we can feel.
Sources for the history-painting series
Art Value Lab has developed these online guides from the supplied illustrated materials for John Walsh’s history-painting lectures at the Yale University Art Gallery. Chapter structure, looking questions and further reflections are editorial contributions. Image sources are identified in their captions. This English edition translates Art Value Lab’s Chinese guides; it is not a transcript of the original lectures.
This series explores ways of looking at European and North American history painting; it is not a comprehensive history of world art.
John Walsh / Yale University Art Gallery lecture series