Lo scherno di Cristo

Grünewald painted this around 1503, and it is the earliest work we can firmly give him, years before the Isenheim Altarpiece that made his name. Look at the man in the background on the left. While Christ sits blindfolded and bound, being punched and having his hair yanked, that figure calmly plays a flute and taps a small drum. Music was part of the mockery, a way of drawing a jeering crowd around a beaten prisoner. Grünewald sets the scene in the German present of his own day, the torturers dressed in the rough clothes of Rhineland laborers. The blindfold is the cruel joke at the heart of it, since the men are taunting Christ to guess who just struck him.