Christ before Pilate

The civil trial

After the night hearings before the religious authorities, Christ is taken to Pilate. The Roman governor conducts the only trial with legal force in the story, since the charge that matters in his court is not blasphemy but kingship. Luke inserts a further appearance before Herod, after which Pilate takes the case back. The sequence — Annas, Caiaphas, Pilate, Herod, Pilate again — is the most procedurally detailed stretch of the gospels.

Where it falls

Between the arrest and the flagellation. The trial scenes are what separate the night of the arrest from the morning of the sentence, and a cycle that shows them all gives the Passion its slowest passage.

The record

The catalogue gives Jacek Malczewski, 1910, and the Lviv National Art Gallery in Ukraine. It measures 80.5 by 65 centimetres. The style is entered as Art Nouveau and Modern and the artist as Polish — one of four Polish entries in a catalogue that files 131 works under Italian, and one of the latest works here to take a Passion episode as its subject. The subject fields class the work as a male figure and as religious. The measured palette reads as brown. Nothing on commission or provenance is recorded.