Taking of Christ

The arrest in the garden

The episode follows the agony at Gethsemane without a break: Judas arrives with an armed party, identifies Christ with a kiss, and the arrest is made. The gospels add the drawn sword and the severed ear, and a young man who flees. Painters compressed it into a single crush of bodies around two heads brought close together, with armour and lanterns supplying the light.

Where it falls in the Passion

Second scene of the Passion, immediately after the prayer in the garden and immediately before the night trials. It is the point at which Christ stops acting and begins to be acted upon, and the rest of the cycle through to the entombment follows that reversal.

The catalogue record

The entry gives Caravaggio as the artist and 1602 as the date of creation, with the painting at the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. It measures 133 by 169 centimetres, horizontal. The style is classed both as Baroque and as tenebrism — the record's term for the manner built on a dark field and a narrow light — and the artist as Italian. The subject fields class the work as a group composition and as religious. The measured palette reads as brown.