Christ Taking Leave of His Mother

An episode the gospels do not contain

The parting of Christ from his mother before the Passion is not narrated anywhere in the four gospels. It came from late medieval devotional literature, which filled the gaps in the text with scenes a reader could feel, and it became a fixed subject in German and Netherlandish painting around 1500. Reporting that honestly is the point: this is a picture of an episode that devotion supplied, not one that scripture records.

Where it was placed

Immediately before the entry into Jerusalem and the events of the last week, so that the cycle acquires a farewell it otherwise lacks. Its function is to give the mother a scene of her own between the ministry and the cross, since the gospels place her at Cana, at Calvary, and almost nowhere in between.

The record

The catalogue gives Albrecht Altdorfer, 1520, and the National Gallery, London, at 141 by 111 centimetres. The style is entered as Northern Renaissance and the artist as German; the subject fields class the work as a group composition and as religious. The measured palette reads as green and turquoise — turquoise is returned by the colour reading of exactly one entry in this catalogue of 468, and this is that entry. Nothing on commission or provenance appears in the record.