Yesterday, the New York Police Department released photos of Luigi Mangione’s extradition to New York City. The accused murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson appears in prison-jumpsuit orange, a speck of color surrounded by a phalanx of gray-garbed and grim-visaged police officers brandishing semi-automatic weapons. Behind him, no doubt excited for the photo op, is indicted Mayor Eric Adams. The intention behind the photograph seems clear: Any violence enacted against the corporate state will be met with overwhelming force, and Mangione — a man with no history of previous violence nor a single criminal conviction — is so dangerous that he requires a veritable army to restrain him.
The image backfired spectacularly. The officers wear Kevlar, but only a thin red t-shirt and oversized jumpsuit shields Mangione from the bitter December cold. The cops hold guns, and the accused is handcuffed. To many perceptive internet commentators better educated in Western art history and visual rhetoric than the NYPD, one comparison in particular stood out. Replace the orange prison garb for an orange robe, the guns for spears, and you’ll see clearly that the authorities inadvertently transformed a perp walk photo of Mangione into a Renaissance painting of the arrest of Christ. Writer Rebecca Solnit, using the initials that signaled Roman imperial authority, noted on Facebook that the photograph depicted “SPQR and NYPD, together at last.” That the beatific and dark-curled Mangione is, as many have noted, unusually handsome, only underscores the difficulty of trying to produce propaganda that casts him as villainous.
Indeed, the photographs are eerily reminiscent of paintings such as the German religious portraitist Heinrich Hofmann’s 1858 “Arrest of Christ.” The visual perspective is the same, centered as it is on a defenseless figure without weaponry surrounded by heavily armed representatives of the state. The arrangement of legionaries about Christ looks almost identical to that of NYPD officers about Mangione. The two are even wearing the same color.
There is a venerable history of depictions of Jesus’ apprehension by the authorities at Gethsemane, drawn from the gospel’s accounts, tracing back to the Middle Ages. A Medieval altarpiece from the late 15th century held by the Walters Museum in Baltimore depicts a similar dark-complexioned and curly-haired prisoner being manhandled by a coterie of guards. A century later, the Spanish painter Juan Correa de Vivar’s 1566 “The Arrest of Christ” similarly depicts the state’s brutality against the future martyr. Such depictions of Christ have spawned an imagistic vocabulary evident in works by artists from Giotto to Caravaggio, creating an archetype that led someone on X to post that Mangione is “kinda like a prettier Jesus.” It’s a comparison that would be offensive to many, not least of all because Jesus Christ didn’t kill a healthcare CEO. Yet Christ’s own feelings about the rich, evidenced by his contention about the wealthy getting into heaven as easily as a camel through the eye of a needle, suggest what a genuine Christian response to predatory health insurance might look like.
You need only skim the comments posted below articles and editorials about Mangione’s alleged crime to see the disjunct between official censure and public opinion. From the comments sections of Reddit to Facebook to Bluesky to X, there has been a stunning (and to many, worrying) response to the assassination that seems to unite left and right, socialists and Trump true believers: that the shooting was on some level understandable, if not justifiable. Many in the media and government reacted to that sentiment with indignation and opprobrium, which has in turn been largely ignored or mocked by the public. When a columnist at New York Magazine opined that while the shooting was a tragedy, healthcare inequity in the United States made it “inevitable,” Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman (once lauded as a champion of the working class) called it a “shitty take.” And yet nearly 41% of voters in their 20s see Mangione’s actions as justified.
Meanwhile, Bret Stephens, columnist at the New York Times, argued in a risible editorial that Thompson was “the real working-class hero,” that the murdered executive is a “model for how a talented and determined man from humble roots can still rise to the top of corporate life.” You don’t need to countenance political assassination to correctly interpret that Stephens’s argument — that a healthcare executive who pioneered the use of artificial intelligence to deny legitimate medical claims is a hero — is a spectacular reach. That this practice no doubt increased the death and suffering among those whom UnitedHealthcare ostensibly covers in service of improving the company’s profit margin only confirms the moral incongruities of Stephens’s claim. That’s certainly what the overwhelming majority of the aforementioned internet commentators noted as heartbreaking stories of denied claims were shared beneath the editorial. After publishing an op-ed by the CEO of the UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, the New York Times received so much backlash that it turned off the comments.
Yesterday’s photographs are only the latest in this saga of the media’s inability to read the pulse of the public. The political and media class have been entirely unable to capture the narrative of Thompson’s shooting. Whatever one’s opinions on the intersections of violence and politics, it’s undeniable that we’re currently witnessing the rise of a folkloric figure, an avatar of the rage felt so strongly by so many Americans that it transcends partisanship in this most partisan time. As a result, when columnists try and portray Mangione as a kind of Ted Kaczynski, he just ends up looking as romantic as Che Guevara; when the NYPD ferries him to the courthouse as if he were Hannibal Lecter, he appears rather as if Christ. Some artists and meme creators have taken that charge literally, with Newsweek reporting about a Towson, Maryland pizzeria that hung up a picture of Mangione as the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the haloed suspect holding two fingers aloft in benediction.
Whatever one’s position on all of this — that it’s a dangerous precedent normalizing murder or an organic expression of rage from a populace abused by the system — is secondary to the fact that something angry, vengeful, and not without reason is brewing among the American people that the authorities can’t yet begin to comprehend. Maybe art history can lend a clue as to what that might be.
