Hand-painted in oil
About this Artwork
The guardroom
The crowning with thorns takes place indoors, among soldiers, after the sentence. The gospels give it in a few lines: a crown plaited from thorns, a robe, a reed, and homage performed as insult. Because the scene has no landscape and no crowd, seventeenth-century painters used it as an occasion for figures pressed close around a single light source.
Where it falls in the cycle
Between the flagellation and the road to Calvary, in the same interval as the mocking, with which it is often combined. Twelve titles in this catalogue carry the word thorn, split between the full guardroom scene and the isolated head; this one, by its recorded dimensions, belongs to the first kind.
The record
The entry gives Matthias Stom, 1639, and the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA, US. It measures 110.8 x 161 cm, horizontal, which is the proportion a group around a seated figure asks for. The style is entered as Tenebrism and the artist as Dutch; the subject fields class the work as a single male figure and as religious, a classification that sits oddly against a scene the title implies is peopled, and it is reported here as recorded. The measured palette reads as ochre and red.
Sources
3 references- Matthias Stom — Wikipedia
Matthias Stom or Matthias Stomer (c. 1600 – after 1652) was a Dutch, or possibly Flemish, painter who is only known for the works he produced during his residence in Italy. He was influenced by the work of non-Italian followers of Caravaggi
- Stom, Matthias — Getty ULAN
Dutch painter, ca.1600-after 1650, active in Italy
- Matthias Stom - Mocking of Christ — Wikimedia Commons
High-resolution image of the work, hosted on Wikimedia Commons.
