Ladder

Ladder is a subject in art. The gallery holds 65 works in this subject in art, including works by Raphael, Édouard Manet and Jacopo Tintoretto.

A ladder is a vertical or inclined set of rungs used for climbing or descending — either rigid, leaning against a surface or self-supporting, or flexible, like rope ladders hung from above. Yet in the visual arts this humble tool rarely appears as mere equipment. From its earliest religious uses it carried a charged double meaning: a literal device for raising and lowering bodies, and a metaphor for the soul's passage between earth and heaven. The image draws on Jacob's dream in Genesis 28, in which a ladder set on the earth reaches to heaven with angels ascending and descending — a motif art historians trace back even further, to the Babylonian descent of Ishtar through seven gates.

The ascent metaphor was given its most systematic visual form in Eastern Orthodox art. The Sinai icon known as The Ladder of Divine Ascent (late twelfth century, Monastery of Saint Catherine) illustrates the c. 600 treatise of John Climacus — "John of the Ladder" — showing monks climbing thirty rungs toward Christ while demons drag the faltering down with ropes and arrows. The same theology shaped Western imagination, and William Blake's luminous watercolour Jacob's Ladder (c. 1799–1806, British Museum) reimagined the rungs as a spiral stair of light winding up through a starlit sky.

In Passion imagery the ladder turns instrumental. Counted among the Arma Christi, the Instruments of the Passion, it is the tool of the Deposition, by which Christ's body is freed from the nails and lowered for burial. Rogier van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross (c. 1435, Museo del Prado) set the type, its figure on the ladder still clutching the drawn nails; Peter Paul Rubens's monumental Antwerp altarpiece (1612–14) gave it Baroque drama. Such Deposition and Crucifixion scenes — echoed in works the catalogue holds, including a Descent from the Cross and Pedro Orrente's Crucifixion — made the ladder a fixture of devotional art.

Alongside this sacred lineage runs an everyday one. Dutch church interiors such as Emanuel de Witte's Oude Kerk place workmen's ladders amid soaring architecture, and Vincent van Gogh's The Olive Orchard (1889, National Gallery of Art), painted near the Saint-Rémy asylum, sets olive-pickers on ladders in swirling Provençal light. Between heaven and harvest, the ladder remains one of art's most resilient bridges between the material and the transcendent.