Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
The scourging
Pilate had him scourged: the gospels give the flagellation in a clause and painting expanded it into one of the fixed Passion subjects. The convention places Christ bound to a low column with two or more soldiers at work, and it is one of the episodes where the number of figures is not fixed by the text at all — the tormentors are supplied by the painter.
Where it falls, and what stands beside it
After the sentence, before the crowning with thorns. This catalogue holds twelve works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, and three of them share this entry's year, 1538, and its location, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna: the flagellation, an arrest of Christ, and a carrying of the cross. Three adjacent Passion episodes with one date and one collection. The record does not describe them as a set and this page does not either — it reports the coincidence and leaves it there.
The record
The entry gives 108 by 84 centimetres, an upright at moderate scale. 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 ochre and yellow. No commission is recorded.
Sources
1 references- Cranach, Lucas, the elder — Getty ULAN
German painter, draftsman, and printmaker, 1472-1553
