Rembrandt, in his painting Flayed Ox (1655), now in the collection of the Louvre Museum in Paris, reminds us in reality of the image of Christ crucified: a butcher’s carcass, a body or meat extended or, rather, spread out, because it is also hooked up. “True animal crucifixion, this flayed ox shows us the expressionist realism of Rembrandt.The pathos of the scene invites the spectator to consider the civilized cannibalism of the Dutch Golden Age.” The artist Chaim Soutine tried to paint his own flayed ox (c.1924) (…) His picture, with an almost gory sensuality coming through its open flesh, shows us humanity, as well as divinity—both of which take on animality when shown in this way. But, finally, we have to wait for Francis Bacon and the comments that he made on his own work to see what there is of the religious and the Christ-like in the theme of the flayed ox (…) In the upper part of Painting, the carcass of an animal is stretched out and the flesh is spread forth so that we can see the “carcass of meat.” When he was asked whether these works were “painted as part of Christian culture and… made for believers,” Bacon replied, “Yes, that is true.” But the image of the Crucifixion is, he says, “a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation,” rather than just one particular set of beliefs. (…) The painter talks about this in a way that contemporary believers might find quite difficult to understand: “I’ve always been very moved by pictures about slaughter-houses and meat, and to me they belong very much to the whole thing of the Crucifixion… Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal.”
- ‘The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist’ by Emmanuel Falque, tr. George Hughes
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