When Knighthood was in Flower

He wears a suit of armor with effortless elegance, yet he is no warrior; if he were, he would bear a helmet and gauntlets. And he is young, strikingly so (though youthful and beardless too is the other knight, the one riding out of a walled city). Malo mori quam foedari – “Death before dishonor.” Those words unfurl on a sheet of paper amid the grass – the heraldic motto of the Order of the Ermine, but also a phrase that suits youth, its purity, its intransigence. This, to us, is the essence of Vittore Carpaccio’s Young Knight in a Landscape. But Eduardo Barba Gómez, with his sharp botanical eye, sees and interprets something more – details that our gaze barely skims. Lilies, irises, violets, periwinkles – the meticulous floral world of the painting – allow him to propose a new reading. Many of the botanical species depicted by Carpaccio carry funerary symbolism, as if the painter were informing us that his young hero has been touched by mourning. Is it possible, then, that the entire painting is an epicedium – “a sublime and harmonious floral elegy”?