Christ taking leave of his mother

The parting before Jerusalem

The gospels contain no farewell between mother and son. The scene came into painting from later devotional writing, which supplied what the narrative had left out: a leave-taking before the last journey, in which the mother is told what is coming. Its whole content is speech and grief, and it is one of the few episodes in a Passion series that has no external event in it at all.

Where it falls in the cycle

At the boundary. Behind it, the ministry; in front, the entry into Jerusalem, the supper and the arrest. Northern painting in the early sixteenth century placed the subject at the head of Passion sequences precisely because it is a threshold: the last domestic scene before a public execution.

The catalogue entry

The record gives Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1520, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. It measures 110 x 83.5 cm, upright and at the scale of a small altar panel. 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 brown. The record carries no patron, no chapel of origin and no ownership history, so none is claimed here.