Die Verspottung Christi

Manet sent this to the Paris Salon of 1865, and hung beside it his Olympia, the nude that became the scandal of the year. Between the two, the critics were merciless; one dismissed this canvas as a horrible Ecce Homo. It was Manet's last religious painting. He took an old and sacred subject, Christ stripped and jeered at by Roman soldiers before the crucifixion, and borrowed the pose from Titian and Van Dyck, painters the Salon revered. What offended people was the handling. The flesh is pale and flatly lit, the soldiers look like ordinary studio models in costume, and there is none of the finish a holy scene was supposed to have. An American heir to a farm-machinery fortune later left it to Chicago.