Christ in the House of Simon

Around 1500, in the crowded Augsburg workshop of Hans Holbein the Elder, this panel was made for an altarpiece on the Passion of Christ. It shows a scene from just before that story darkens: Christ at a meal in the house of a man named Simon, where a woman kneels to anoint his feet while the host looks on. The altar it belonged to has long since been broken up. Some of its Passion panels stayed here in Basel, while two others now hang in the National Museum in Warsaw. Who actually painted it is an open question. The work is traditionally given to Sigmund Holbein, a painter in the same shop, yet the faces sit so close to Hans's own Grey Passion, made in these very years, that scholars still weigh how much is one man's hand and how much the workshop's shared manner. The Grey Passion itself, twelve panels in muted grey, was finished around 1500, the same moment this quieter scene was set down.