Christ Carrying the Cross

Bosch painted this in the Netherlands around 1500, and on the back of the very same panel he painted a small Christ child learning to walk with a toy windmill, so the two faces of the wood hold a life at its beginning and near its end. The front shows Christ carrying the cross, but Bosch crops in tight and fills the frame with heads. Faces press in from every side, jeering, sneering, some of them barely human in their ugliness, the crowd rendered as a wall of cruelty. In the middle, eyes closed and calm, Christ carries the beam through them without looking up. Tree-ring dating of the panel points to a date around 1500, later than the museum long assumed.