Flagellation of Christ

Look at the feet of the man swinging his arm at the edge of the panel. His red hose end in shoes with long, curling points. Around 1460, when this panel was painted in the Salzburg region, such pointed shoes were a fashion across much of Europe, and in 1463 an English law barred anyone below a lord from wearing points longer than two inches. The painter dressed Christ's tormentors as men of his own day, in short doublets, coloured hose and a turban. One grips him by the hair, another seizes his chin, and a man kneeling on the chequered floor has a bundle of birch rods at his knee. Christ stands roped to the column under a row of Gothic arches, his body marked all over with small drops of blood.