Christ on the Mount of Olives

From 1781 the Habsburgs' picture collection could be visited by the public in the rooms of the Upper Belvedere, and this canvas is recorded in that imperial gallery from the same year. Paul Troger had painted it some 30 years earlier, around 1750, as one of several versions of the subject.

Most painters of the night in Gethsemane show the disciples asleep a few steps away. Troger leaves them out. Christ kneels alone at a rock, hands clasped and head bowed low over them, while an angel leans in beside him with one arm raised. On the rock stands the chalice, the cup of suffering he prays to be spared. Nearly everything else is darkness, and only on a second look do small weeping angels appear in the gloom behind him.