A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools / Including by Special Permission Notes Collected from the Works of John Ruskin

by Unknown

1087. THE MOCKING OF CHRIST.

Unknown (Early German: 15th century).

Sir Martin Conway says of the Lyversberg Passion what is equally applicable to this picture, and indeed to most of the German art of the same period (cf. e.g. 1049). "The Passion, as conceived by this painter, was a scene for the display of brutality rather than the exhibition of heroism. The enduring Christ is not the subject of the pictures, but the torturing villains that surround him. The figure of Christ does not dominate the rest; the vile element seems always victorious" (Early Flemish Artists, p. 202).