In this scene we see a young man wrapped in cloth being carried by his friends who wear identical robes. From the title we can discern that this young man is sick and that his friends are probably bringing him to a hospital. Although there is no mention of anything religious, we liken this scene to the Deposition of Christ from the Book of John, where the disciples take Christ’s limp body down from the cross. We make this jump because of the solemnity of the scene and because Modderman’s work is reminiscent of Caravaggio’s highly dramatic biblical scenes through his use of chiaroscuro, high realism, and the tight crop that places us viewers right in the thick of it.
