Elpenor, the Emmaus Pilgrim and the Missing one: painting and the historical

problem of life configuration

by José Emilio Burucúa (UNSAM)

and Nicolás Kwiatkowski (CONICET-UNSAM)

Ghost. I am thy father's spirit,

Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love…
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5.

Herodotus explains, close to the beginning of the first of his nine books, the events
occurred on occasion of Solon of Athens’ visit to the court of King Croesus in Sardis. The
king of Lydia was extremely wealthy and a strong ruler. He was convinced of having
reached not only the peak of his power but also that of happiness. Eager to confront these
feelings with the judgment of a wise man, Croesus asked his guest who was, in his opinion,
the happiest person among those he knew. Solon replied that the first in his list would be
Tello. He had seen his own children and also his grandchildren grow successfully, with his
heart full of joy. After that, he had a glorious death bravely facing his country’s enemies, in
the battle of Eleusina. Surprised by the answer, Croesus wanted to know who the second
happiest person in the list was; deeply hoping it could be he. Once again the answer was
disappointing: Kleovis and Biton, two young Argives followed Tello in the scale of joy.
They had been triumphantly crowned as winners at the Phytian games. They returned to
Argos during the feast of Hera, the goddess. The winners’ mother ought to celebrate ritual
sacrifices at the deity’s altar. However, the oxen that should be yoked to the woman’s

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chariot to carry her to the sanctuary never came. In order to replace it, Kleovis and Biton
hung themselves to the yoke to draw their mother to the place. Deeply moved by her
children’s attitude she implored Hera the greatest grace ever given to any other human
being. That night, after the banquet sacrifice, Kleovis and Biton fell asleep inside the sacred
precinct, and they slept so deeply that they never woke up. Two statues devoted to the
memory of such joyful heroes were placed in the city treasure: at Apollo temenos in
Delphos.12 Croesus remained speechless. Then he reproached Solon for failing to recognize
his own happiness within his reign, The Athenian replied:

As for thee, I perceive that thou art both great in wealth and king of many men, but that of which
thou didst ask me, happy, I cannot call thee yet, until I learn that thou hast brought thy life to a fair
ending: for the very rich man is not at all to be accounted more happy than he who has but his
subsistence from day to day, unless also the fortune go with him of ending his life well in possession
of all things fair. […] Summing up, it is always necessary to count on the end […]13

Solon’s words have been clear enough. Somehow we could consider that his speech
highlights the issues under discussion here. No life is completely configured until the
existence is finished, when death arrives. Moreover, life is not configured until its memory
is established in history, at all levels, and in art (this is the case of Kleovis and Biton’s
sculpture; it could have been just the same Pindaro’s poetry honouring the athletes).

The paramount importance that Greek civilization gave to funeral rites confirms the
concept that human life on earth is only finished and dignified by such an end. Antigone’s
myth comes immediately to mind. In Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus’ daughter accomplishes
the ceremonies owed to the corpse of her brother Polynices. Thus, she defies the cruel order
of her other brother Creonte, king of Thebas, who refuses to allow Polynices burial. Hence,
she herself was condemned to death. Saying these words Teiresias, the soothsayer,
reproaches this unfairness to the king himself:

[…]thou hast thrust children of the sunlight to the shades, and ruthlessly lodged a living soul in the
grave; but keepest in this world one who belongs to the gods infernal, a corpse unburied,

12
The sculptures have been kept and are today at the Museum in Delfos.
13
Herodotus, Histories, I, xxxi-xxxiii.

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 unhonoured, all unhallowed. In such thou hast no part, nor have the gods above, but this is a
violence done to them by thee. Therefore the avenging destroyers lie in wait for thee, the Furies of
Hades and of the gods, that thou mayest be taken in these same ills.14

Earlier than the fifth century there is another example worth mentioning. I refer to
Elpenor’s episode in the Odyssey, when Ulysses and his companions are about to leave
Circe’s island heading to the underworld to take advice from the same Teiresias. Then
Elpenor, the youngest and most foolish of the sailors, falls from a roof and dies before he
can join the sailing crew. When Ulysses calls upon Teiresias’ shadow in the Hades
antechamber, other dead people’s souls appear: Achilles, Agamemnon, his mother Anticlea
of whose death he was unaware, and Elpenor who pleads the king of Ithaca to remember
him when he returns to Circe’s island:

There, then, O prince, I bid thee remember me. Leave me not behind thee unwept and unburied as
thou goest thence, and turn not away from me, lest haply I bring the wrath of the gods upon thee.
Nay, burn me with my armour, all that is mine, and heap up a mound for me on the shore of the grey
sea, in memory of an unhappy man, that men yet to be may learn of me. Fulfil this my prayer, and fix
upon the mound my oar wherewith I rowed in life when I was among my comrades.15

Let us say that those who are alive have the sacred duty of completing the
configuration of the lost life of the dead who are questioning them on that. There is a
moving scene in a pelike dated 450 BC and decorated by Lycaon the painter: Elpenor’s
shadow, his hat lying on his shoulder as pilgrims’ do, appears to Odysseus who is sitting
beside the lambs he has just sacrificed to Teiresias, his chin bent on his right hand, assisted
by Hermes at the Hades’antechamber.16 The adolescent comes on scene from the left,
making his return from the underworld. Without stopping, he raises his arm and waves a
hand to draw both Ulysses and the numen’s attention. Further on, we shall analyse this
formula of representation transmitted to the Renaissance Christian art, including its peculiar
pathos, associated to the contrast between dead and living people. But I would like to
briefly point at an ancient example, in which I believe to have found an alternative to the
formula and a transposition of the mythic passage to real life: the stele of Demokleides. He
14
Sophocles, Antigone, vv. 1078-1081.
15
Homer, Odyssey, book XI, vv. 71-78.
16
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, William Amory Garden Fund. 34.79.

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was a hoplite who died in combat during the Corinthean war in 395 17. He is sitting at a
trireme bow, resting, and his armour left behind. The young man does not watch the sea-
line but looks deeply downwards, his head held in his right hand, willing to see his future
destiny clearly into the Hades house. Maybe Demokleides’ family speculated on the
possibility that the memory could make Elpenor’s sad legend become patent behind the
stele representation. I am afraid we are unable to go back in time and look for Ulysses
companion’s grave in Aeaea Island in order to confirm or reject our suspicion.

Jesus resurrection was built on the pagan concept of life being only completely
configured after death and funeral rites. Moreover, Christ being resurrected entails
overcoming death and the triumph of an individual’s second life, forever reconfigured.
Nevertheless, the new religion of salvation did not leave aside the external act of
recognition that the living ones were to perform regarding the exceptional dead person who
comes back to life. This is as if Christ himself needed the definitive historic configuration
that others owed him. Emmaus episode, as per Luke’s Gospel,18 is possibly the most
comprehensive manifestation of the configurative anagnorisis of Jesus’ life. On the route to
Emmaus, Jesus from Nazareth meets Cleopas and another pilgrim who, although being his
disciples, do not recognize him. When Cleopas tells the man the events from the moment of
Jesus trial up to his death and corpse disappearance from the grave, the unidentified man
reveals himself as a profound expert in the Sacred Books, revealing what Moses and the
prophets announced regarding Christ’s coming. In spite of such demonstration, Cleopas and
his companion remain unaware of whom they met on the route. Upon their arrival to
Emmaus, the man is invited to share lodging and dinner with them. Only when he breaks
and distributes the bread is him recognized as Jesus reborn.

And they said one to another, Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way,
and while he opened to us the scriptures?

Saint Augustine’s Sermon 236 for Easter time was devoted to the interpretation of
the passage just quoted. We would like to emphasize that Augustine followed Jeronimus’

17
Athens, Archeological Museum
18
Lu 24: 13-35.

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Vulgata introducing Christ as a pilgrim but not the other walkers to Emmaus who asked the
newcomer: “Tu solus perigrinaris in Ierusalem, et nescis quid actum sit in illa istis diebus,
de Iesu Nazareno, qui fuit propheta magnus?” “(Wasn’t it you the one who visited
Jerusalem as a pilgrim and still you ignore what happened to Jesus of Nazareth, the great
prophet?)”. Later, Jesus is called hospes by Augustine of Hippo at the time he is sitting at
the table breaking the bread. This means that he is recognized as guest by Cleopas and his
friend only at that point in the story. Saint Augustine’s point of view is that the Emmaus
pilgrim is Christ himself, and certainly not his disciples, as per the late medieval or modern
exegesis and Christian iconography. But what is most interesting in the Church Father’s
writings is the fact that Emmaus chapter evidenced the superiority of charity over
knowledge. While the third man fully spread his enormous biblical command the hearts of
the other two men were burning but they still did not recognize him. However, when they
had welcomed him with sustenance and shelter, when they showed a charitable spirit, the
guest appeared to them as who he really was: Jesus reborn. There is a double way for the
configuration. When charity is exerted by Cleopas and his companion they definitively
configure the pilgrim’s life. But also, while they are compensated by the possibility of
loving him through the act of grace, the disciples’ lives are also configured.

The Augustinian turn that considers Jesus playing the role of a strange pilgrim
started to grow in iconography only at the beginning of the sixteenth century. This was
achieved through the impulse of deep renovation and rereading of St. Augustine’s writings
given by two generations of European scholars, at both sides of the watershed drawn by
Luther’s reform. The strong influence exerted by Augustine’s theology over the religious
experience of Italian humanists, theologians and mystics between 1500 and 1540 is very
well known.19 Such spirituality had surely been transmitted to the artists who worked for
the friars of the Saint’s order around such period. Early in 1506, Fra Bartolommeo had
already painted an extraordinarily well done fresco at the lunette crowning the door of St.
Mark’s Dominican convent’s refectory in Florence. In this work we can see Emmaus Christ
dressed as a pilgrim. Regarding this work Vasari wrote:
19
See Ginzburg, Carlo and Adriano Prosperi, Giochi di pazienza. Un seminario sul “Beneficio di Cristo”,
Torino, Einaudi, 1975; Cantimori, Delio, Eretici italiani del Cinquecento. Ricerche storiche, Sansoni,
Florence, 1939 (specially the third edition, Einaudi, 1992, with introduction and notes by Adriano Prosperi),
Williams, George, The Radical Reformation, Kirksville, Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1992.

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 […] he worked on a fresco on the arch over Saint Mark’s refectory in Florence. In the arch he
painted Christ with Cleopas and Luke above the picture he also did portraying a young fray Niccolò
della Magna who was later archbishop of Capua and lately cardinal.20

But the relationship between this Dominican painter and the Augustinian Order became
closer ten years later, when the artist was reaching the end of his life and he painted the
Deposition from the Cross, a huge altar pathetic picture for the Augustinian convent at the
edge of Porta Saint Gallo, Florence. But there is another case in which the commission’s
chronology links up to the closeness of the artist to the Order of Augustine of Hippo in
Cremona, which enables us to place a representation of Emmaus’ route under the influence
of Augustine’s theology. I am referring to the beautiful picture on this theme painted by
Altobello Melone, dated around 1516, today at the National Gallery in London. Vasari
commented on Melone’s work: “[…] as everybody can see, Altobello painted a beautiful
and graceful style chapel picture on fresco technique at St. Augustine’s church, in the same
city (Cremona).” 21 That cycle is dedicated Augustine’s life.

In the London Emmaus painting, the strangely young Christ (who wears hat and
cloak and carries a pilgrim’s cane) comes from the left. Just as it happens with Elpenor in
the fifth century BC pottery. Jesus’ gesture makes the disciples stop and turn back to look
at him. Maybe the arrangement of such foreground could remind us of the pelike we have
already analysed. The step by step study of the formula’s concrete deviation from Antiquity
to the Renaissance certainly demands a historical work that we have not yet carried on. For
the time being, we are only submitting the general notions of the images’ secular itinerary,
where we believe to have discovered the problem of the representation of life, thus
configured by and after death. Please remember that, at the back of the landscape of
Melone’s work, there are two details that fulfil St. Luke’s chronicle. We can find a view of
Christ’s sepulchre on the left, with Magdalene kneeled and maybe the silhouette of Jesus
approaching. It could be a Noli me tangere. And on the centre, we see three figures walking
on the route to Emmaus: this could be the moment when the stranger explains to his

20
Vasari-Milanesi, vol. IV, p. 197.
21
Vasari-Milanesi, vol. VI, p. 492.

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companions, with astonishing wisdom, the announcements and prefigurations about Christ
in the Scriptures.

In order to give evidence about the exceptionality of Fra Bartolommeo’s and

Melone’s versions of Emmaus’ story, in which Jesus is the pilgrim, I would like to offer a
quick review of this iconographic theme from the fifteenth century up to the mid
seventeenth century.

Duccio di Buoninsegna, beginning of the XIVth. Century, Jesus is the pilgrim.

Juan de Flandes, end of the XVth. century, Jesus is not the pilgrim.
Another version by Juan de Flandes, the hat probably points at Jesus as pilgrim.
Giovanni Bellini, c. 1490, Jesus and the two pilgrims at the table, recognition of the Lord.
Pontormo, c. 1525, Jesus and the two pilgrims at the table.
Jacopino da Ponte, c. 1540, Jesus is the pilgrim.
Titian, 1540, no identification of pilgrims.
Tintoretto, 1542-44, Jesus and the two pilgrims at the table.
Paolo Veronese, 1559-60, Jesus and the two pilgrims at the table.
Matthias Stom, c. 1620, Jesus and the two pilgrims at the table.
Rubens, c. 1630, Jesus and the two pilgrims at the table.
Le Nain, c. 1630, Jesus and the two pilgrims at the table.

Unexpectedly, and seemingly far from the Christian tradition, a text written by a
seventeenth century Jesuit offers a secular version of the configuration of life that we have
been tracing. In El Criticón -the symbolic and labyrinth-like roman written by Baltasar
Gracián- Critilo and Andrenio, the main characters, finally manage to get safe to
Immortality Island. This place is nothing but the well deserved fame land, the Ithaca where
you can only get through death after having enjoyed life. Here is how the pilgrim, who
guides the adventurers to the blessed land in El Criticón, expresses such an idea:

Real and close Immortality Island is. Because there is nothing more adjacent to death than
immortality: from the former you slip into the latter. Then, no matter how prominent, you will see no
man esteemed during his life. Neither Titian was in painting, nor Buonaroti in sculpture, nor

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 Góngora in poetry, nor Quevedo was in prose. Nobody appears to be what he is until he disappears.
Nobody is acclaimed until he passes away. So that, what death is for others, it is life for notable men.
I can assure you I have seen it and have been wandering, fully enjoying it and, still my task is to lead
the renowned men there.22

At this point, let me go back to the issue stated at the beginning. I will connect it
with the problem of the representation of genocide during the twentieth century genocide. I
understand that such a chronological leap is enormous, but I hope I will be able to fill in the
blanks in a later re-elaboration of this paper. Nevertheless, I am convinced that what I have
said so far, spurred by the stimulating subject of this seminar, is only an introduction to
possible hermeneutics for the exploration of the most pressing issue in Argentine culture
during the last thirty five years: the desaparecidos, their history, and our future. I am part of
a group of historians and art historians at the University of San Martín that are working on
the subject of the limits for the representation of historical traumas in the modern world,
from the Wars of Religion in France to the genocide in Srebrenica. But, in all honesty, this
research was born out of the never ending perplexity that rises from that irreducible core of
our historical experience: the last dictatorship and the people that are still missing.

What follows is the result of my work with Nicolás Kwiatkowski. Contemporary

artists faced with the difficulties of visually and discursively narrating the iniquity of the
great historical massacres of the twenty first century, have used silhouettes to represent
trauma. We could follow a path of representations, which offers traces and landmarks and
starts with the Massacre of the Innocents, composed as a collage by Max Ernst in 1920,
which possibly expresses the horror motivated by the terrible carnages of World War I.
Another expression of this representational formula can be found in the photographs and
human remains which, as a whole, compose the silhouettes of the Cambodian Genocide at
Phnom Penh Museum. Lately, Gilles Peress shot some in situ photos of the victims of the
Rwandan genocide. One of them shows the traces left on the soil by the volatilization of the
body of one of the victims. The traces refer to the idea of a silhouette, and the same could
be said about the image of a shrouded dead body compacted against the earth. An

22
Gracián, Baltasar, The Criticón, Third Part, Crisis XII.

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installation at the Jewish Museum of Berlin and several works by Chrisian Boltanski follow
the same inspiration.

The silhouette has a major role in two memorial sites devoted to Argentinean and
Chilean missing people. Certainly, in the Argentine case there is an essential background:
the “Siluetazo”. It was a collective artistic demonstration in September 21 st 1983, stemming
from a project by Rodolfo Aguerreberry, Guillermo Kexel and Julio Flores. 23 The initiative
of these authors was grounded on their previous participation at the Object and Experiences
Award from Esso Foundation, in 1982. But the original expectations were surpassed and
the event became a crowded collective action. The use of the silhouette in this case,
according to the artists, was inspired on a poster published in 1978 by the UNESCO
Courier, where a number of silhouettes, equalling the daily dead people at Auschwitz, were
depicted.24 Nevertheless, it is interesting to see that on page 9 of the same issue an
engraving from Paul Siché called “The eternal victim” was reproduced. In this work, the
person shot as well as the executioner appeared as silhouettes. Anyway, with such
inspiration in mind, the decision of representing all the missing persons and performing a
collective action was made. The site was the very same plaza where they received the
support of Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Thus, Aguerreberry, Flores and Kexel proposed to
the Madres the production of thirty thousand silhouettes in life-size. The objective was to

…demand that all political detainees would appear alive, as well as to state other claims that were
thought of in an earlier demonstration. Our intention was to provide another channel of expresion
that would endure in time, we wanted to create a visual fact that would strike upon the military
government due to its physical magnitude and formal development. We also wanted to create
something unusual, that would attract the attention of the media, and to make the people join us in
preparing the activity from several days before it actually took place. 25

23
About the Siluetazo, see Ana Longoni y Gustavo Bruzzone, El Siluetazo, Adriana Hidalgo, 2008.
24
The Unesco Courier, Paris, october 1978, p. 22.
25
“Reclamar por la aparición con vida de los detenidos por causas políticas y todas las otras exigencias que se
hicieron cuando la marcha de repudio al informe militar, darle a una movilización otra posibilidad de
expresión y perdurabilidad temporal, crear un hecho gráfico que golpee al gobierno a través de su magnitud
física y desarrollo formal y por lo inusual renueve la atención de los medios de difusión, provocar una
actividad aglutinante, que movilice desde muchos días antes de salir a la calle”. The original document can be
consulted at Madres de Plaza de Mayo Archives. Copy also available at CeDInCI (Centro de Documentación
e Investigación de la Cultura de Izquierdas en la Argentina). Full quote in Longoni and Bruzzone a.m.book

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 On September 21st 1983 the action began when student’s organizations,
demonstrators and passers-by offered their bodies to trace the silhouettes of every absent
body. It was a gigantic urban intervention that covered a great deal of the city. Thousands
of silhouettes demanding truth and justice were stamped on pavements, walls, blinds and
city signs. According to Amigo Cerisola,”the silhouettes made the absence of bodies
present in a stage design about the State terror”.26

The overwhelming mass demonstration from 1983 allows us to better understand

the intervention on the outside fence of the former Navy Mechanics Officers
School building in Buenos Aires, today transformed into a Site for Memory and Human
Rights (ex-ESMA). Over the bars still bearing the shapes of old forged-steel vessels,
dozens of men, women, and children silhouettes have been added. Sometimes the latter
hide the older figures; sometimes they circle the original décor.
Sometimes black and empty, sometimes colourful or transparent, the silhouettes are even
full of inscriptions carrying the names of the missing people. They aim at representing,
from the remembrance of the most horrifying crime, the magnitude of state terror. This
crime implies both the personal physical destruction and the absence of the bodies, carried
out by a clandestine system devised for such a purpose. In Buenos Aires, the resource to the
silhouette as a means for representing the disappearances conveyed other expressions. For
example, the urban installation and totemic group produced in the 1990s at the same
location where the Athletic Club clandestine detention centre had been (in the corner of
Paseo Colón and Cochabamba), resorted to that type of images. The same can be said about
the sculpture with no title produced by Roberto Aizemberg in laminated bronze, located at
the Memory Park, beside the Rio de la Plata, though in this case the silhouettes are empty
or fragmented.

The historical origin of the use of silhouettes in Chilean memory sites is not as
clear as in the Argentine case. Nevertheless, they have a crucial presence in Alfredo Jaar’s

26
Herrera, María José, “Los años setenta y ochenta en el arte argentino”, en Burucúa, José Emilio (editor of
the volume), Nueva Historia Argentina. Arte, Sociedad y Política, Vol. II, Buenos Aires, Sudamericana, 1999,
p. 154.

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work Geometría de la conciencia, an installation located under the Memory and Human
Rights Museum in Santiago de Chile.27 This is a piece that can only be understood through
its relationship with the museum, although it offers a different way of accessing the tragic
history of the dictatorship than the one museum does. In Jaar’s work, the meaning only
becomes evident through visual exploration, and not by the objects or by means of the
narration as in the neighbouring institution. Geometría de la conciencia is buried in front of
the museum, in a place that seems to be a scar. Descending to the memory chamber leads to
a dark room. Little by little, beams of light fill the chamber, filtering through innumerable
silhouettes: they represent not only the victims of the dictatorship repression machinery, but
also contemporary Chilean citizens. Then, the bright blaze fades. But even in the darkness,
the silhouettes’ eerie traces remain in the visitors’ retina for a while. The mixture of
darkness and light once again refers to the relationship between presence and
disappearance, between absence and memory. Even more, we can find in this installation an
attempt to link the past to the present. The missing people’s presence is intensified by the
fact that they are kept company by the silhouettes of the survivors. Moreover, a similar
argument could be made about the memory of the bodies of those who were not born by the
time the massacre had taken place. However, the huge number of silhouettes and the light-
darkness relationship communicate the sensation of iniquity that the massive killing and the
appalling damage produced to the Chilean social network.

On the other hand, Geometría de la conciencia probably leads us to interpret the

images game involving absent people and survivors like a funerary rite. In Latin America,
the lack of funerary rites or post-mortem acknowledgment of the effigy in the corpse 28 is
one of the most heartrending features of the relationship between the missing people under
Latin American dictatorship and their grieving relatives. Therefore, in the missing people’s
case, the social process of configuration of their lives could not be finished. The shape of

27
Regarding this paper you can fruitfully consult Lisette Olivares text, “La geometría de la conciencia:
Un archivo introductorio”, emisférica, 7.2,
http://hemisphericinstitute.org/journal/7.2/multimedios/jaar/introduccion.html, consulted on Feb.1st 2012-
See English version at http://hemisphericinstitute.org/journal/7.2/multimedios/jaar/
28
Gabriel Gatti insisted on defining a missing person as “ a trimmed individual, a body set apart from its
name, a conscience split from its physical support, a name isolated from its history, an identity deprived from
its ID,” Gabriel Gatti, El detenido desaparecido. Narrativas posibles para una catástrofe de la identidad,
Montevideo, Trilce, 2008. p. 47.

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the missing people in Latin America has the outline of an unfinished existence. The
silhouette and its interaction with the living people would provide the shape needed for the
definitive configuration of their lost lives.

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