Christ at the Column

This canvas is shaped like a lunette, a wide half-moon with a curved top, because it was built to sit over a doorway. In the 1660s it hung on the inside entrance wall of the Terese in Venice, the church of the barefoot Carmelite nuns, fixed above the left-hand door where anyone leaving would pass beneath it. The scene is the flagellation. Christ is tied to a low, stubby column while his tormentors work around him and an officer in armor looks on. At more than three metres across, the figures are close to life size, so a worshipper stepping out met the violence almost head-on. A matching lunette by the same hand, Christ crowned with thorns, hung over the other door. Both are dated to the years around 1665 to 1670.