Le Couronnement d'épines

By the time Caravaggio painted this, probably in the first years of the 1600s, he had a powerful protector in Rome, the banker and collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, who owned a whole wall of his work. That patronage let him paint violence exactly as he saw it. Christ sits bound while two men press a crown of thorns down onto his head with wooden staves, leaning their whole weight into it, and an armoured officer looks on without expression. There is no glow of holiness, only the ordinary brutality of men doing a job. Scholars still argue whether it was made in Rome before Caravaggio fled the city after killing a man in 1606, or later in Naples. It reached Vienna in 1816, bought years earlier for the imperial collection.