The Casting of Lots

Andrea Mantegna’s Crucifixion in the Louvre, painted on panel, was originally the central element of the predella of the artist’s high altarpiece of 1456–59 for San Zeno in Verona.

The main part of the work, which represents the Virgin and Child with musician angels in a continuous triptych format between saints—four to either side—remains in its original location. Like many predellas—and the triptych by Andrea Vanni elsewhere in this exhibition—this one involved a left-to-right narrative. Here, as in Vanni’s triptych, the Crucifixion was preceded by the Agony in the Garden, but in this case the finale was the Resurrection rather than the Descent into Limbo.

It is explained in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and John that Golgotha means ‘place of a skull’, and in addition to one at the foot of the cross, a whole mass of them and other bones fill a small cave at far left. 

In the foreground, the mourning Saint John the Evangelist on Jesus’s right is balanced on the other side by a Roman soldier on horseback looking up at Christ—he is presumably the Centurion who declared ‘Truly this man was the Son of God!’ (Matthew 27:54; Mark 15:39). At the very foot of the cross is Mary being held up by the Holy Women, once again counterpointed by the soldiers casting lots.

This counterpoint between right and left both replicates the contrast between good and evil as it is embodied in the two thieves on either side of Christ, but also complicates it. The soldiers, with their insouciance towards the executed men above them, are hardly exemplary figures, as the mourners at the foot of the penitent thief’s cross are. But they handle Christ’s garment with cautious interest, and may (like the Centurion) be on the verge of some epiphany.

Perhaps it is not our place to judge them, for, as Augustine has it:

By [their] casting of lots, what else is commended but the grace of God? … When the lot is cast, the award is decided not by the merits of each individual but by the secret judgment of God. (Tractates on The Gospel of John, 118.4)

Andrea Vanni’s signed Crucifixion in the National Gallery of Art in Washington is the middle panel of a small folding triptych, and is flanked by scenes of the Agony in the Garden and the Descent into Limbo, to form a compact left-to-right narrative sequence.

Dating from the late fourteenth century, and set against a gold backdrop, it shows Christ on the cross, with Mary Magdalene embracing it and Saint John the Evangelist nearby. Jesus is between the ‘Good Thief’ (on his right and attended by angels) and the ‘Bad Thief’ (on his left—or ‘sinister’—side and tormented by devils). The latter’s legs are being broken.

To either side of the cross are Roman soldiers on horseback, the Centurion who believed in him (Matthew 27:54; Mark 15:39), and the one who pierced Christ’s side (John 19:34–37) whom later tradition held to have been converted in that moment. Both in consequence are given haloes. In the foreground to Christ’s right are the fainting Virgin attended by the Holy Women, balanced on the other side by three Roman soldiers resolving who will have Christ’s robe.

Vanni shows these three soldiers—and this is very unusual—drawing lots in the form of straws. In spite of the fact that our expression ‘drawing the short straw’ means being the loser, it has to be assumed that here the odd straw out—whether it is shorter or longer than the other two—is the winner.

There remains the question of what precisely is being won here. On a literal level, the soldiers all hope to gain possession of nothing more nor less than a garment. However, it is immediately apparent that the artist has portrayed it as one of considerable beauty and refinement, comprised of what in his day were the two most expensive pigments—a rich blue robe adorned with gold trim at the neck, wrists, and hem.

At the same time, read figuratively in a way that was common in Church tradition, it must surely signify something more; something more like a sacramental sign. For, ‘woven from the top without seam’, it ‘represented his divinity, which was undivided because it was not composite’ (Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Tatian’s Diatessaron, 20.27).

The Crucifixion by Bernardino Luini in Santa Maria degli Angeli, Lugano, which is inscribed with the date 1529, is an immense fresco that fills the tramezzo—a kind of partition that divides the nave from the choir—of the church in question. Luini takes advantage of the scale at his disposal to fill the background with six supplementary narratives, which (reading from left to right) represent three earlier episodes (the Agony, the Mocking of Christ, and the Way to Calvary) to Jesus’s right, and three later episodes (the Lamentation, the Incredulity of Saint Thomas, and the Ascension) to his left.

In the main scene, many of the same characters from the two other (earlier) works in this exhibition—by Andrea Vanni and Andrea Mantegna respectively—are repeated. Indeed, they are often performing the identical actions. But there are straightforward additions and one particularly intriguing difference.

When it comes to additions, Luini represents a woman with her children at the left edge of the composition to symbolize Charity, and also the sun and moon, in allusion to the ‘darkness over all the land’ recorded by Matthew (27:45), Mark (15:33), and Luke (23:44–45). He also includes the man who features in all four Gospels, and gives Christ a sponge filled with vinegar (19:29), who is absent from the treatments elsewhere in this exhibition.

The striking difference concerns the soldier with the lance: John 19:24–27, relates that ‘one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water’, and over time there grew up a legend that this individual, subsequently called Longinus—and often, but not here, also taken to be the Centurion of Matthew 27:54 and Mark 15:39—was blind and that his sight was miraculously restored by Christ’s blood. Self-evidently, that is why Luini shows him rubbing his left eye with his left hand.

Fitting company for the impious thief above them, the soldiers casting lots for possession of Christ’s seamless garment are here shown as violent men, and are about to fight over the robe—seemingly to the death, for one soldier is captured in the act of drawing his dagger. They risk tearing the robe in the process, just as the body which once wore it has been so cruelly rent.