Christ among the Doctors

Twelve years old, in the Temple

This is the only episode the gospels give from the years between the infancy and the baptism. Luke reports that Jesus, aged twelve, stayed behind in Jerusalem after Passover and was found three days later among the teachers, listening and asking questions. Painters reduced it to a confrontation of faces: a young head surrounded by older ones, argument carried in hands and expressions rather than in setting.

Where it falls in the cycle

At the seam. It ends the infancy narrative and it is the last scene before an eighteen-year gap in the record, which the gospels do not fill. The next episode in the sequence is the baptism in the Jordan, with Christ already an adult. A cycle running in order treats this panel as the closing of childhood.

The record

The catalogue gives Albrecht Durer as the artist and 1506 as the date of creation, with the painting in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid. It measures 80 by 65 centimetres. The style is entered as Northern Renaissance and the artist as German, and the subject is classed as a group of figures and as religious. The measured palette reads as ochre. The record carries no note on the commission or on where the panel was before Madrid.