Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
The arrest, in a Passion series
The episode is the seizure in the garden of Gethsemane. Judas arrives with an armed party sent from the chief priests, the kiss identifies the prisoner, and Christ is taken. It is the shortest scene of the Passion and the one that changes the grammar of the whole cycle: up to this point Christ moves and speaks, and from here he is moved and questioned.
Where it falls
Directly after the prayer on the Mount of Olives and directly before the night hearings. In Northern altarpieces built as a row of Passion panels the arrest is usually the second compartment, since the agony in the garden opens the sequence.
The record, and what sits beside it
The catalogue gives Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1538, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, at 153 by 119 centimetres. The style is entered as Northern Renaissance and the artist as German. This catalogue holds twelve works by Cranach, and three of them carry the same year and the same Vienna location: this arrest, a flagellation, and a carrying of the cross. Three consecutive Passion episodes, one date, one collection — the record describes a group without saying so, and this page reports the coincidence rather than explaining it. The measured palette reads as brown.
Sources
1 references- Cranach, Lucas, the elder — Getty ULAN
German painter, draftsman, and printmaker, 1472-1553
