Christ blessing the Children

Let the children come

All three synoptic gospels record it: people bring children to Christ, the disciples try to turn them away, and he stops them, saying the kingdom belongs to such as these. The composition that follows from the text is a press of women and infants against a single seated or standing figure, with the disciples pushed to the edges. It is a teaching episode with no miracle and no confrontation.

Where it falls in the cycle

In the late ministry, on the journey toward Jerusalem, close to the blessing scenes and the discourses about the kingdom. It sits before the entry into the city and therefore before the Passion, and in sixteenth-century German workshops it became a repeated subject in its own right rather than one panel of a cycle.

What the record holds

The catalogue gives Lucas Cranach the Elder as the artist, 1550 as the date of creation, and the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, as the location. It measures 82 by 122 centimetres — a horizontal panel, wider than tall, which suits a composition built from a row of figures. The artist is recorded as German and the subject fields class the work as a group of figures. The measured palette reads as ochre.