Christ Meets His Mother

The meeting of Jesus and his mother on the road to Calvary appears in none of the four Gospels. It came from later devotion, and when the Stations of the Cross took their fixed form it became the fourth of them. This small grey sketch was painted for a series of those Stations, together with a companion of the same size in the Belvedere. Christ staggers forward, bent under the cross, while a woman stands close by at the edge of the scene, her hands raised toward him. Higher up, an arm is flung out with a white cloth, and a small dog darts past at ground level. The museum catalogues the sketch under the name of Franz Joseph Spiegler, who died in 1757, dates it to around 1780, and records an earlier attribution to Franz Sigrist the Elder.