Christ and the Adulteress

Titian painted this in Venice around 1512 to 1515, while he was still in his twenties and not yet the city's official painter. The story is from John's gospel. A woman is dragged before Christ to be stoned for adultery, and he answers that whoever is without sin should throw the first stone. Titian lines up half-length figures across a long, low canvas. Christ stands at the front on the left and looks past the crowd, with forgiveness, toward the humbled woman beyond, and a beam of light from the left picks out the two of them. He changed his mind as he worked. X-rays have confirmed alterations, and two of them can be seen with the naked eye, at Christ's right hand and in the sky above the figures. The painting was once in the Venetian collection of Bartolomeo della Nave, then in the Hamilton collection in England, before it passed to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm and so to Vienna.