Ecce Homo

The year 1508 is painted on a white ribbon just below Christ. He stands in a stone window, crowned with thorns and bound at the wrists, while the figure beside him in a broad red hat lifts the edge of his cloak to show him. Below, the crowd pushes in from the street with pikes and raised hands. Their shouts unroll overhead on scrolls of Latin. Up on a landing a drinker tips back a wooden keg, a guard with a scourge comes down the steps, and two women with a baby lean out of an upper window. In the lower corner, apart from all of it, a man in red kneels with his hands together, the donor who paid for the panel. The Belvedere catalogues it under Urban Görtschacher of Villach and records that it came from Heiligenkreuz, the Cistercian abbey in the Vienna Woods.