Christ Healing the Blind Man of Jericho

Healing outside Jericho

The episode belongs to the last stretch of the ministry: on the road at Jericho a blind beggar calls out and is given his sight. Mark names him Bartimaeus. The scene is a roadside crowd, a kneeling or standing blind man, and a hand raised toward his eyes, with the city usually shown behind. Painters treated it as a landscape subject as much as a figure subject, because the gospel account puts it on a journey.

Where it falls in the cycle

Late. Jericho is the last stop before Jerusalem, and this healing is one of the final public acts before the entry into the city that opens the Passion. Its position gives the episode its weight: it is the closing miracle of the road.

The catalogue entry

The record gives Lucas van Leyden, dates the work to 1531, and places it in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg. No dimensions are entered. The style is classed as Northern Renaissance and the artist as Dutch, and the subject fields file the work under landscape and rural as well as religious — consistent with an episode the gospels set on a road. The measured palette reads as brown. There is no ownership note in the record.