The Mocking of Christ

Painted in 1565, this is one of Bassano's harshest subjects. After his arrest, Christ was blindfolded, beaten and taunted by his guards, and Bassano lays the scene out sideways, in a wide horizontal format that pushes the figures right up close. A heavy, brutal man looms over the seated Christ, his fist drawn back to strike. There is no crowd and no grandeur, only a few men at close quarters. It belongs to the years of the Counter-Reformation, when the Church wanted images that made worshippers feel Christ's suffering as their own. Bassano took real trouble over the attackers: a surviving sheet of his drawings, now in New York, works out the pose of one soldier and the bowed head of Christ.