The Agony in the Garden

The scene is the night before the Crucifixion. In the Gospel account Christ goes up the Mount of Olives to pray, knows what is coming, and asks that the cup of suffering pass from him, while the disciples he brought along fall asleep nearby. This canvas dates to about 1605, and around then such night scenes of Christ's fear and prayer were exactly what Catholic reformers wanted on their walls. After the upheavals of the previous century, the Church pressed for images that showed Jesus not as a distant king but as a man afraid in the dark, so that an ordinary worshipper could feel it with him. The painter's name has not come down to us, which was common for devotional pictures made to be prayed before rather than admired.