Christ in the House of Simon

A meal, and the woman who interrupts it

The episode is a dinner at the house of a Pharisee named Simon, in the seventh chapter of Luke. A woman known in the town for her sins comes in uninvited, weeps over Christ's feet, dries them with her hair and anoints them. The host's objection is unspoken and is answered anyway. It is a table scene in which the important action happens on the floor.

Where it falls

In the ministry, long before Jerusalem. It should be kept apart from the anointing at Bethany in the last week, which is a different meal at the house of a different Simon; the two are frequently conflated, and a title naming the Pharisee settles which one is meant.

The record

The catalogue names Dirk Bouts, dates the work to 1445, and gives the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. It measures 40.5 by 61 centimetres, a small horizontal — the scale of a panel for a room rather than an altar. The style is entered as Northern Renaissance and the artist as Dutch; the subject fields class the work as a group composition and as religious. The measured palette reads as red. Of the 395 dated entries in this catalogue, forty-four carry a year of 1500 or earlier, and this is one of them.