Christ Carrying the Cross

Bosch painted this Christ Carrying the Cross around 1505, in the last stretch of his life in the Netherlands, and it is a quieter, more orderly procession than the crush of grotesque faces he is famous for elsewhere. Christ bends under the cross, moving toward Calvary among his tormentors and onlookers, with a landscape opening behind. The panel belongs to the Spanish royal collection, part of the deep Spanish taste for Bosch that later filled the Escorial and the Prado with his work, and it hangs in the Royal Palace in Madrid. A companion problem shadows it. A closely related Christ Carrying the Cross in Ghent, long given to Bosch, was judged by the research team that studied all his paintings to be a workshop copy rather than his own hand, a reminder of how thin the line can be between the master and the followers who painted beside him.