Christ in silence (Grey Passion-9)

A numbered station

The recorded title carries its own position: Grey Passion-9. The work is the ninth unit of a Passion series, which means the episode is defined as much by its place in a sequence as by its content. Silence is the content: through the trials before the high priest and the governor the gospels repeatedly note that he answered nothing, and painting made that refusal a scene in its own right.

Where it falls in the cycle

Among the trials, after the arrest and before the sentence. A numbered Passion series is the clearest form the episode angle can take, because the maker has already done the ordering: panel eight leads to panel nine, and a viewer walking the series walks the hours of the Friday in order. The record gives the number but not the length of the series, and this page does not guess at it.

The record

The catalogue gives Hans Holbein the Elder, 1500, and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany. No dimensions are recorded, so nothing is said here about the panel's scale. 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 ochre and yellow.