Focus on The Mocking of Christ (Cimabue) and analyze the Description.
The Mocking of Christ measures 25.8 cm × 20.3 cm × 1.2 cm (10.16 in × 7.99 in × 0.47 in) and depicts the mocking of Jesus prior to his crucifixion. The work is painted with egg tempera on a gold leaf background, on a thinned and slightly bowed poplar panel prepared with layers of gesso ground in which a canvas is embedded. It is thought to date from 1280.The panel is thought to be part of a diptych with four painted scenes on each wing, depicting the passion of Christ, sometimes known as the Diptych of Devotion. Two other scenes by Cimabue, painted on wood panels of similar size, have been identified as parts of the same diptych: the Virgin and Child with Two Angels in the collection of the National Gallery in London (discovered in Suffolk in 2000) and The Flagellation of Christ, in the Frick Collection in New York since 1950.The Mocking of Christ is one of only a dozen works that have been attributed to Cimabue, none of which were signed by the artist. It shares similarities with Cimabue's other works in the way that the facial expressions and buildings are depicted and in the use of light and perspective. The National Gallery describes the polyptych as representing "a crucial moment in the history of art" as it comes from a time when Italian painters began to move away from the Byzantine tradition towards a more naturalistic representation of events.It is the only known small-scale work of Cimabue to use the same techniques to display a crowd of figures that can be seen in other, larger-scale works, such as his frescoes at Assisi. The scene follows the biblical account in Matthew 27:27–30. Christ, in a red robe and blue cloak, is standing at the centre of the composition, with his eyes uncovered in the Byzantine style: in contemporary depictions from Northern Europe, he would be seated and blindfolded. He is impassive, with arms limp and a sorrowful expression, among a crowd of slightly shorter men who are angrily striking Christ with rods, a sheathed sword, or their bare hands; one appears to be reaching up to remove Christ's halo. To either side stands a person with a sheathed sword; buildings in the background in Byzantine reverse perspective frame the scene under a luminous gold sky.An infrared reflectogram has revealed Cimabue's underdrawing. Damage to the paint shows the panel was removed from the bottom left corner of a frame, and the edges have been evened-up with a dark border. It is suspected that an original red border is underneath, like the two other surviving paintings from the diptych, which also show similar woodworm holes. With the other two panels, they appear to be three of a set of four panels, with the upper right panel missing. A reconstruction of an unusual eight-panel Florentine diptych of c. 1320 by the Master of San Martino alla Palma suggests that the fourth panel would be a crowd scene of the Betrayal of Christ, while the four panels of a hypothesised second leaf would depict the Way to Calvary, the Crucifixion, the Entombment, and the Last Judgment. A similar Venetian diptych of c. 1300 in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts also has six Passion scenes, with the Virgin and Child and the Last Judgment. All seem to be associated with communities of Clarissan nuns in northern Italy.
Matthew 27:27–30 Virgin and Child with Two Angels Diptych Virginia Museum of Fine Arts poplar Cimabue egg tempera tempera Clarissan nuns crucifixion diptych Last Judgment infrared reflectogram Master of San Martino alla Palma Diptych of Devotion Entombment underdrawing gesso gold leaf Byzantine style Betrayal of Christ reverse perspective National Gallery Passion Assisi Suffolk mocking of Jesus halo The Flagellation of Christ Frick Collection Byzantine tradition