The works of PierLuigi Zoccatelli, who left us last month, may serve as a guide to the greatest painting of the Venetian artist.
by Massimo Introvigne
![Carpaccio, “Portrait of a Knight.” Credits.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/BITTER-WINTER-9.jpg)
![Carpaccio, “Portrait of a Knight.” Credits.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/BITTER-WINTER-9.jpg)
When last year the great exhibition of Vittore Carpaccio (1465–1525 or 1526) moved from Washington DC to Venice there was one notable painting missing, the “Portrait of a Knight” or “Young Knight in a Landscape” of the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid. The Spanish museum had organized in 2022 an ad hoc exhibition after the restoration of the painting. It allowed it to travel to Washington but not to Venice.
This was a pity, since from many points of view, including the painter’s relationship with religion and spirituality, the “Knight” is the most important work of Carpaccio. It is also a work one can only understand by referring to the Medieval bestiaries and herbaria explaining how each animal and plant carried a symbolic meaning. It was a matter of great importance for the recently deceased PierLuigi Zoccatelli (1965–2024), who studied and translated in Italian the works of French scholar of symbolism Louis Charbonneau-Lassay (1871–1946). These studies are the key to understand works of art such as the “Knight” and many others, and this article is a homage to Zoccatelli a few days after his death. Indeed, I had the opportunity to discuss Carpaccio’s “Knight” with PierLuigi some years ago, and my comments below owe much to these conversations.
First, the portrait reconfirms the archaism of Carpaccio, who is not so much—as the English Pre-Raphaelites understood—the first painter of the Renaissance but the last of the Middle Ages. In fact, he died poor and almost forgotten because the new Renaissance taste no longer understood his greatness, which was rediscovered only after several centuries. The work is an extraordinary compendium of the medieval chivalric spirituality and taste for symbols, particularly those drawn from the animal and plant kingdoms.
It is now taken for granted among critics that this is precisely a portrait of a knight, not two knights or even a knight and his squire. The two images depict the same knight, but at two different stages of his journey. We see him on horseback as he emerges from a Venetian-style fortress, ready for battle. And we see him in the foreground as he stows his sword in its scabbard. This close-up figure—portrayed with extraordinary quality, in what is considered the first full-length portrait in the history of Western art—may well allude, as some think, to the fact that the knight is dead. He puts his sword back in its scabbard and takes leave of this world. In this case, the motto of the Order of the Ermine, the Breton chivalric order “revived” in Carpaccio’s time by the King of Naples Ferrante I of Aragon (1424–1494)—“malo mori quam foedari,” “I would rather die than stain [my honor]”—which appears on a cartouche next to the animal, the ermine, would refer precisely to the protagonist’s death in battle. But it could also be that he puts the sword back in its scabbard simply because his mission is accomplished.
![King Ferrante I of Aragon. Credits.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/BITTER-WINTER-1-5.jpg)
![King Ferrante I of Aragon. Credits.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/BITTER-WINTER-1-5.jpg)
The painting is a great allegory of Christian “militia” and chivalry. The sea and the pond are only an initial allusion to the myriad trials and difficulties that the Christian must endure to reach the finish line.
A rich symbolism of animals and plants is added. In the upper left, a heron, a symbol of suffering, is wounded. The animal is dying, and one can see there a further symbol of the death of the knight. The heron has been attacked by a hawk, symbolizing the pitfalls of evil. Another hawk stands perched on the tree to the right, threatening the sparrows, the “birds of the air” evoked by Jesus Christ himself and symbolizing souls.
Carpaccio’s message is that yes, evil is at work in history, and it undermines souls. It undermines the very soul of the knight who on his journey encounters a peacock, the symbol of pride. The peacock, or pride, almost penetrates into the very depths of the knight on horseback, while still further to the left a riderless horse, hung in the guise of an inn sign, symbolizes the passions without bridle and without restraint. To the right, at the two trees, a rabbit and a hare flee: this is the temptation of cowardice and flight in the face of danger. The vulture standing near the water and the deer represent decadence and death. The frogs and toads hiding in the grass near the ermine on the lower left are temptations in their basest and most vulgar shape.
But little by little, in confronting vices and temptations, the knight also conquers virtues. The ermine is a symbol of purity, and the ancients believed that the animal preferred to be captured and killed rather than hide where it would soil its spotless fur. The deer to the right of the second tree represents meekness and tenacity in the face of adversity. The stork flying between the two trees represents filial “pietas”—it was believed at the time that, a unique case among animals, the stork cared for its parents, not just its children. The duck represents serenity and calm. All these are not more or less fanciful interpretations but descend from medieval bestiaries with which Carpaccio was clearly familiar.
That the painter is calling us to a dramatic vision of the story is confirmed by the contrast between the two dogs, the good white-haired dog accompanying the knight and the aggressive, red dog depicted further to the right. These are icons of the good angel and the bad angel, of the divine and demonic suggestions that confront each other in the story. The evil “great dog” perhaps also alludes—as has been suggested—to the title “Great Khan,” given after the Mongols to the Turkish sultans (“Khan” sounds like “cane,” “dog” in Italian), and in this case the battle the knight fights would specifically be Venice’s war against the Turks. But this, in turn, for Carpaccio would be only one episode in a drama always at work in history and transcending its individual events.
![The Battle of Zonchio (1499), depicted by an unknown artist, was part of the Venetian-Ottoman war that happened during Carpaccio’s lifetime. Credits.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/BITTER-WINTER-2-1.jpg)
![The Battle of Zonchio (1499), depicted by an unknown artist, was part of the Venetian-Ottoman war that happened during Carpaccio’s lifetime. Credits.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/BITTER-WINTER-2-1.jpg)
Uniquely rich—of a taste, again, typically medieval and even more difficult to understand today—is also the symbolism of plants. Not surprisingly, it is precisely this in Carpaccio that will enthuse the Pre-Raphaelites, who will try to reproduce it in works, such as John Everett Millais’s (1829–1896) “Ophelia”, which are veritable botanical treatises.
In Carpaccio’s work, however, the problem lies in the fact that many botanical symbols are ambivalent. Consider, for example, a very visible flower, the red anemone near the legs of the knight. This, since classical mythology, has been an omen of death. But at the same time in Christian symbolism it signifies, like the purple worn by cardinals, blood shed for the faith and readiness for martyrdom. Gladioli signify violent death: but also the sufferings of Our Lady of Sorrows. To the right, not far from the evil dog, we see daffodils, in Greek mythology the flower of Proserpine, queen of the underworld, and thus a flower linked to hell. And next to the ermine we see instead a lily, symbol of purity par excellence, contrasted with brambles, which symbolize disorder. We also find—and the list would not end here—chamomile flowers, which stand for quietness, and the blue periwinkle, which the Middle Ages considered the flower of fidelity and Heaven.
Thus, in a single painting, Carpaccio has offered us a compendium of chivalric spirituality, grounded in a dramatic vision of history. Life is militia, and the knight’s is a journey, an itinerary fraught with obstacles and trials but where help comes from virtue and Heaven itself. In the end, after defeating the enemy, perhaps the Turks, and perhaps at the cost of his own life, the knight puts up his sword. His battle had ended, and perhaps with him the Middle Ages, a dying world Zoccatelli studied with passion and competence and of which Carpaccio was the last storyteller.