Christus nach der Geißelung

Most painters showed the flagellation itself, the whipping at the column. Murillo, around 1665, chose the moment just after, when the soldiers have walked off and Christ is left alone on the stone floor, reaching toward his discarded robe. Two small angels lean in, one grieving, one adoring, the very feelings the picture was meant to draw out of whoever knelt before it. This was made for the intense private devotion of Counter-Reformation Seville, where a worshipper was expected to feel the body's pain as their own. Murillo painted the battered skin so that it still seems to glow. He thought the composition worth repeating and made a second version of the scene, now in Illinois, while this one eventually crossed the ocean to Boston.