Flagellation of Christ

A painter in Vienna made this panel around 1430 to 1440, and its recent travels are better documented than its beginnings. In 1976 it was with a dealer in Cologne. It then spent years in a private collection in the Rhineland, part of that time on loan to the diocesan museum in Freising, in Bavaria, before it was sold at auction in Cologne in 2014. A year later it reached Vienna as a long-term loan to the Belvedere. Christ stands roped to a column at the waist and ankles, against a gold ground under a vaulted arcade. Men in short coloured tunics crowd around him. Two swing bundles of birch rods above their heads, and another grabs his hair. Spent rods already lie scattered on the tiled floor. Its companion panel, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, is also in the Belvedere.