Cristo en el Monte de los Olivos

Caravaggio, Christ on the Mount of Olives, 1605. Wikimedia Commons. · PD

Cristo en el Monte de los Olivos


Ficha

Año
1605
Técnica
óleo
Tipo
pintura
Dimensiones
154 × 222 cm

La historia

You cannot go and see this one. It burned in May 1945 in the Friedrichshain flak tower in Berlin, where the Kaiser Friedrich Museum had stored more than 400 works for safekeeping as the war closed in. What survives are old photographs and a strong paper trail. A Caravaggio of exactly this subject and size is listed in the inventory of the Roman collector Vincenzo Giustiniani and his brother, a cardinal, for whom the painter made a set of sober religious pictures around 1604. Whether the burned canvas was entirely his own work was already being questioned before the fire. It showed Christ praying on the Mount of Olives on the night of his arrest, his disciples asleep a few steps away.