Vatican Museums

Emile Bernard’s Résurrection is a painterly reworking of a drawing by Michelangelo dated 1532, which never led to a finished work, and demonstrates the artist’s lasting interest in Italian art, especially of the Renaissance. The excellence of Buonarroti here becomes the source of inspiration for a mature reflection, dictated by the profound mysticism that runs through Bernard’s entire career, which began under the influence of his first encounters in Paris with van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, and then continued with his close friendship with Gauguin, with whom he founded the School of Pont-Aven in 1888. Faithful to the original, modifying only the posture of the Risen Christ and His shroud, Bernard uses a strongly expressive pictorial language here, underlined by the heavy black outlines of the figures and an intense materiality in the application of the colour.