This 30 x 40 inch oil and acrylic painting on canvas pays homage to the astounding Piero della Francesca Renaissance painting, “The Flagellation of Christ” housed at the Ducal Palace in Urbino, Italy, circa 1468. I saw it there while studying art and staying at the University of Urbino under the auspices of the School of Visual Arts in New York. It made a powerful and lasting impression and I wanted to draw upon its unique composition while utilizing a more personal and contemporary iconography. Instead of the Renaissance and religious figures, I used a troupe of flamenco dancers to populate the painting so I could use their graceful gestures and poses to echo some of the compositional elements and flow of Piero’s masterpiece. The swooning dancer in the background gallery is in a pose based on a combination of the positions of the Christ figure in Renaissance Pieta and Deposition from the Cross paintings. He is being symbolically whipped by the skirt of the female dancer’s red dress. The statue of Apollo atop the column in Piero’s work has been replaced by the female statue of Athena Nike. The empty background staircase in the original is filled with a figure reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2”.
This painting can be read as a deeply sincere homage to the artistry of Piero. The goal, however, is obviously not to depict a religious scene, but rather a secular scene of the powerful hold a woman can have over a man who desires her. The statue on top of the column replaces Piero’s Apollo with a statue of the goddess as Athena Nike, with Nike meaning “victory” in Greek. She was often worshipped this way in ancient Greece as a prayer for victory in war.
An additional reading is as a nod to three major periods in the history of art, the Classical, the Renaissance and the Modern represented by the Cubist figure tripping down the stairs in the background. The leftmost foreground figure gestures in the air with his left hand, flinging the turquoise paint used to outline the figures towards the background scene, symbolizing the connection of all the former periods of art to a contemporary work.
The Flagellation, After Piero by Ellen Chadwick, oil on canvas, 30″x40″, 2017, in collection of the artist.