Die Gefangennahme Christi

Van Dyck painted this while still in his early twenties in Antwerp, working in the orbit of Rubens, the greatest painter in Northern Europe, whose energy and scale you can feel him reaching for. He took on the subject of Christ's arrest at least three times around 1618 to 1620, and this is one of those attempts. The scene is the moment of the kiss: Judas takes Christ by the hand and leans in to betray him with an embrace, while soldiers and a torch-lit mob surge around them in the dark. Van Dyck holds the two central figures almost still against all that commotion. Within a few years he would leave for Italy and then England, to become the portrait painter to the court of Charles I.