Christ with the Crown of Thorns

In Rome in the mid-1610s, young painters from France, the Netherlands and Germany were learning Caravaggio's manner at second hand, and the painter many of them imitated most closely was the Lombard Bartolomeo Manfredi. The German painter and biographer Joachim von Sandrart, who worked in Rome in the 1630s, later gave that way of painting a name, the Manfrediana methodus, the Manfredi method. Valentin de Boulogne painted this canvas around 1616 or 1617, and he had absorbed the method so completely that the picture was once taken for Manfredi's own. The museum lists what the two share. A dark background, light aimed with care, the upper body of Christ painted with plain naturalism, and the tormentors dressed in fantastical costumes. The scene comes just before Christ is led away to Golgotha. Soldiers mock and beat him and force a crown of thorns onto his head, and he bears it in silence while they jostle around him. The canvas is almost two and a half metres wide, and the museum now counts it among Valentin's major paintings.