Inversione della sovranità : riflessioni a partire da un quadro di Carpaccio

The staging of martyrdom in The Tenthousand Martyrs of Mont Ararat by V. Carpaccio reveals a constitutive logic of sovereignty’s inversion. Such a logic is not reducible to a simple opposition or contradiction between the symmetrical figures of the glorified martyr on the one hand and the sovereign assimilated to tyrant on the otherhand. Carpaccio’s painting is built by complex operations by which all the sovereignty’s modalities are dismissed, neutralized and inverted, conferring to the scene a both political and anti-political meaning. The painting’s analysis aims to reveal how such a representation of martyrdom organizes relations and transitions between might and weakness, activity and passivity, triumph and dereliction, singularity, plurality and community. But all these relations and operations couldn’t be possible without a specific construction of space that links different stages of time and forms of temporality. Construction of space in the painting is then able to marry up the present of representation and the specific present of martyrdom: the apocalyptic time, in which the historical time of sovereignty is absorbed.