Images of Beckett - Index of

eing to the status of icon of impotent suffering.
His flesh is whitened to approximate stone or
white marble; his hands are forcibly raised to his
chest like the praying stone-like figures in a
Mantegna painting or the representations found
on marble monuments. Behind this powerful
image, suggested obliquely, lie centuries of an
iconography of a crucified Christ or of martyred
saints: van Honthorst’s arrow-pierced body of
Saint Sebastian, for instance, from the National
Gallery in London, or Antonello’s ‘magnificent’
(the word was used by Beckett in his German
diaries) painting of the same saint from the
Gemäldegalerie in Dresden. 48 In the end, the
tormented victim in Beckett’s play will not accept
stasis, martyrdom or defeat and raises his head
in a single act of silent but resolute defiance.
In his television play, Nacht und Träume,
Beckett introduced a number of elements that were
borrowed almost literally from religious art. In
religious paintings, a vision often appears in the
top corner of the canvas, normally the Virgin Mary,
Christ ascended in his glory, or either one angel or
a band of ministering angels. In Beckett’s
television play, the hand coming from above the
Dreamer bearing a cup suggests the chalice, and
the cloth that appears to wipe his brow evokes
once again the Saint Veronica handkerchief; 49 the
hand placed on that of the Dreamer is the hand of
comfort and solace, reminding us that for years
Beckett had a reproduction of Dürer’s praying
Johnny Murphy in Catastrophe, 1999