The Mocking of Christ

In 1578 Francesco Bassano, Jacopo's eldest son, painted battle scenes for the ceiling of the Great Council hall in the Doge's Palace in Venice, and the next year he settled in the city and opened a workshop of his own. His father stayed in the small mainland town of Bassano, and the two kept close. The Museum of Fine Arts gives this canvas of the 1580s to both of them, probably made together.

It shows Christ on Good Friday, crowned with thorns, struck and jeered at by the men around him, and he does not strike back. The loose, energetic handling of the paint is the kind Jacopo shared with Titian. The picture has the size of a church altarpiece, almost two metres tall, yet the museum thinks it may have been made for a private owner, to hang in the portego, the long central hall of a Venetian palazzo. It came to the museum as an anonymous gift in 1901.