Christ on the Mount of Olives

The night in the garden

The Mount of Olives is where the prayer before the arrest takes place. Christ withdraws with three disciples, asks that the cup pass from him, and finds them asleep on his return. The episode is the last stretch of freedom in the narrative, and the last in which he speaks at length.

Where it falls in the cycle

After the Last Supper and before the Capture. The agony and the arrest happen in the same place within the same hour, which is why cycles often pair them. Six titles in this catalogue name Gethsemane, and several more, like this one, name the mount instead.

The record, including what it says about the object

The catalogue gives Caravaggio and 1605, with dimensions of 154 x 222 cm. The location field does not name a museum. It reads Destroyed. Two entries in the whole of this catalogue carry that value, and this is one of them: the record states that the object no longer exists, while retaining the measurements and the classification of a work that once did. The style is entered as Baroque and as Tenebrism, and the artist as Italian; the subject fields class the work as a group composition and as religious. The measured palette reads as brown, taken from the catalogue image rather than from a canvas. The record gives no account of how or when the loss happened, and none is invented here.