Scenes from the Passion of Christ (left side)

A whole sequence on one surface

Most works in this catalogue hold one episode. This title holds many: scenes from the Passion, plural, and the parenthesis in the record adds that what is entered is the left side. Panoramic Passions of the later fifteenth century set the successive episodes inside a single continuous city, so that the arrest, the trials, the road to Calvary and the crucifixion occupy different streets of the same view and the viewer reads them by walking the eye through the town.

Where it falls in the cycle

Across it. A picture of this kind cannot be given a single position in the sequence, because its subject is the sequence. The words left side in the record indicate that what is catalogued is a portion, and the record does not say which episodes fall within it, so none is listed here.

The record

The catalogue gives Hans Memling, 1471, and the Sabauda Gallery, Turin, Italy. No dimensions are recorded, which for a work whose form is the point is a real gap; nothing is said here about its scale. The style is entered as Northern Renaissance and the artist as Flemish. The subject fields class the work as religious and also as architectural — the second tag being consistent with a narrative set inside a built city. The measured palette reads as ochre and red.