Meeting toward Emmaus

Magnasco is a painter of extraordinary talent. Son of an artist, he transitions between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by dissolving the baroque splendor in a restless art, moved by an irresistible thrill, as if reality were unraveled before the eyes of the spectators, at the same time appearing as other, as vertiginous and fantastic. This canvas is a good example of his supreme synthetic capacity. The disciples who encounter Christ on their way to Emmaus seem overwhelmed by a presence that they had believed to be ordinary, yet instead is divine. Their bodies, their clothes, and their faces are deconstructed, only appearing to us as very rapid and nonlinear brushstrokes. More defined is the figure of Jesus, who points to himself with a roughly sketched hand, as he stretches towards the men, declaring his own resurrection, accentuated by the brief radiance of his halo. Superb is his willingness to push forward, creating a diagonal that underlines an invincible otherness. Behind the group, a landscape of ruins and ravines further testifies to the fragile yet enchanted bizarreness of the scene.