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| Honoré Daumier Ecce Homo ca. 1849-50 oil on canvas Folkwang Museum, Essen |
The Persistence of Caricature
Daumier is known above all for comic lithographs. The Ecce Homo is one of his rare religious paintings, and caricature is not absent from it, as in the treatment of the crowd, though this is fairly restrained. Unrestrained – and emphatically caricaturized – is the figure haranguing the crowd, asking whether Barabas or Christ should be spared. Rather than Pontius Pilate himself (who asks the question in most versions of the story) this contorted figure pointing at the martyr has the air of an underling. He puts one in mind of a gargoyle protruding from a cathedral.
The Force of Words
He is reminiscent of the lawyer-figures Daumier never tired of denouncing with utmost ferocity, both in drawings and paintings – jeering at the pretensions by which they gained a very real power over language itself, and the ridiculous attitudes they assumed in exercising it. The force of words is here revealed as manipulation by both the Pharisees and the Roman administrators to ensure that Barabas is spared and Christ is condemned. The crowd, though it may well be composed in the main of decent people, takes on the character of a restless and noisy mob ready to do the accuser's bidding. Everything indicates Christ as the one who must be crucified: the accusing finger, the visual echoes of that finger among the crowd, even the shaft of the guard's lance, pointed at Christ's back.
The Silent Presence
The divine yet unassuming figure stands above the crowd, rendered as a vague silhouette, even his crown of thorns barely indicated. Christ is a silent ghostlike presence, a cut-out without eye or mouth, only distinguished from the background by the outline of nose and beard. Daumier makes of him a shadow floating between the raucous horde below and the yelling gargoyle above.
– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)