Ecce Homo

The museum records two dates for this canvas, 1659 and, in an alternative view, 1644. The later date comes with a story. Carlo Cesare Malvasia, a canon of Bologna who knew Guercino well and later wrote the lives of the Bolognese painters, says that the 1659 picture was begun as a single figure of Christ for Prince Ludovisi, of the Roman princely family, and that it was Malvasia himself who persuaded Guercino to add the head of the soldier.

The scene comes from the Gospel of John. Pilate has had Jesus flogged, crowned with thorns and dressed in a purple robe, and he shows him to the crowd with the words Ecce homo, behold the man. A red chalk drawing in the Morgan Library in New York, dated to about 1647, seems to have gone through a similar change. It began as Christ alone, and the soldier's head sits on a strip of paper added at the left.

The canvas was given to the gallery in 1839. It hangs in Sala 30 near Guercino's Prodigal Son, painted in 1617, when he was still in his twenties.