The Healing of the Paralytic

Netherlandish 16th Century

National Gallery of Art

Against a landscape, a pale-skinned man walking hunched over as he carries a large bundle like pillows wrapped in a blanket on his back nearly fills this vertical painting. Close to us, the man walks to our right with his head down and his eyes closed or downcast under straight, furrowed brows. He has a wide, prominent nose, a brown beard, and close-cropped hair. With muscled forearms arms raised overhead, he clutches the forest-green cloth tied around the bundle, which has cloth with dark green stripes against cream white. The man wears a red, waist-length tunic over an ankle-length, bright white garment, which splits up the side to show his muscular legs and bare feet. He strides across a moss-green rock. On the far side of the rock on which he stands, to our left, a sand-brown path curves away from us to the wide, arched opening of a building. The structure has gray walls, possibly stone, with goldenrod-yellow paneling around the second story, and a red roof. At the arched opening, a couple dozen people, tiny in scale, gather around a person who stands and gestures with arm extended over a second person lying on a cloth. The four corners of the cloth are suspended by four ropes, barely visible, where the cloth had been lowered to the ground from above, presumably from the four people on the roof. The people in the crowd wear robes in mustard yellow, navy blue, plum purple, dark red, and white. Another building and a stone tower rise beyond the structure. To our right, the land dips down to the horizon line, which comes about a quarter of the way up the painting. People walk along the distant path that passes in front of a house at the foot of a steel-blue, rocky outcropping. A leafy tree grows where the road bends out of sight, and bands of white clouds stretch across the pale, muted turquoise sky.