Cristo in casa del fariseo Simone

The scene comes from Luke's Gospel. Christ is dining at the table of Simon, a Pharisee, when a woman known only as a sinner kneels at his feet, washes them with her tears and dries them with her hair. Later tradition folded her into Mary Magdalene, though the Gospel itself never names her. Bouts, working in the Low Countries around the middle of the 15th century, sets the whole event in a tidy Flemish room rather than an ancient one, and crowds it with everyday onlookers and objects the story does not strictly need. That clutter is deliberate. It was his way of making a sacred moment feel like something happening in a real house, with real people leaning in to watch.