Der Schmerzensmann

A Man of Sorrows shows Christ alone after the mockery, crowned with thorns and with his wrists bound, made not to tell a story but to be prayed in front of. Botticelli painted this kind of image around 1500, in a Florence still unsettled by the friar Savonarola, who had preached against worldly art and been burned in the main square only two years before. Botticelli's late work turned grave and inward, and this panel belongs to that shift. The attribution is not settled: some scholars give it to Botticelli himself, others to his busy workshop repeating a design he set. It is painted in tempera, the older egg-based medium he kept to the last, while younger painters were moving over to oil.