Christ on the Mount of Olives

The night before the arrest

The Mount of Olives is where the Passion begins. After the supper Christ goes out with the disciples, takes three of them further in, and prays while they sleep. The episode is built on a gap between two states — one figure awake and in distress, the others unconscious a few paces away — and painters used that gap as the whole composition, sometimes adding the torches of the arresting party already visible in the distance.

Where it falls

First scene of the Passion, immediately before the arrest. Twelve titles in this catalogue place a work on the Mount of Olives, in the garden of Gethsemane, or in the olive garden; all three names describe this same night, and the record does not standardise between them.

The record

The catalogue names Mabuse, dates the work to 1507, and gives the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, at 85 by 63 centimetres — a modest upright, well under altar scale. The style is entered as Northern Renaissance and the artist as Flemish; the subject fields class the work as religious. The measured palette reads as brown. The entry records nothing about the commission or about the panel's route to Berlin, so nothing is stated.