Instruments of the Passion of Christ

This strip of oak, barely 16 centimetres high and 68 long, sat at the foot of an altarpiece, below a panel of Christ shown to the crowd and its two wings, resting on the altar table itself. Its subject is the instruments of the Passion, the objects of Christ's suffering set out one by one for a worshipper to dwell on, with Saint Veronica's cloth among them.

The panels have had a strange passage through the salerooms. At Christie's in London in July 1888 the ensemble was sold as anonymous early Flemish work, described as a triptych with Ecce Homo in the centre and saints and donors on the wings, for 19 pounds 19 shillings. When the same panels came up at Christie's again in November 1948 they made 682 pounds 10 shillings, about 34 times as much. The London dealer Arthur Kauffmann sold the centre to Boston in 1953 and gave the museum the wings and this predella three years later.