The Crowning with Thorns

Entry

Mark (15:17-18) describes how Christ was mocked by Pilate’s soldiers following his imprisonment and flagellation. They draped a purple robe around his body and hailed him ‘King of the Jews’ by placing a crown of woven thorns upon his head. The present relief depicts the moment of this latter act, with two executioners using a large stick to press the crown of thorns into Christ’s head until it bleeds. To maximize their effort, they place their knees on the bench on which he sits. With his arms bound, Christ undergoes this painful degradation in a dignified manner and without showing emotion.

In all probability, the group belonged to an Antwerp Passion retable. In most cases, the Crowning with Thorns appears in the bottom register on the right, with the Ecce Homo in the middle. The flat surface of the group’s foremost bottom edge is furnished with two square mortises for securing purposes. In its original state, a piece of foreground with additional figures was likely attached to this surface, with a second piece comprising an architectural background and several other figures similarly attached at the back.¹

On the basis of the elongated bodies, the unnatural rotation of the torso on the right-hand figure together with the caricatural rendering of his grotesque facial features, this retable group can be ascribed to the closing phase of Antwerp Mannerism, circa 1540. Comparable stylistic traits can also be discerned in a Christ Carrying the Cross in the Rijksmuseum collection (BK-NM-1230), a work once attributed to ‘entirely the same hand’,² and an Ecce Homo in the former Welker collection at Eastbourne. The Christ type in the Amsterdam Crowning with Thorns also closely resembles that of the latter retable group, which has been (most likely erroneously) linked to Robert Moreau (documented 1532-37), an Antwerp sculptor known only from archival sources.³

Bieke van der Mark, 2024