エッケ・ホモ

Bosch painted this Ecce Homo in the 1490s, the scene where Pilate shows the scourged Christ to the crowd and says, here is the man. The mob presses in from the right, faces twisted, and gold letters float up from Christ toward them. But the strangest thing about this panel is what is barely there. Along the lower edge you can make out pale, ghostly figures, a kneeling family of donors who once occupied the foreground and were later painted over. An X-ray in 1983 found fifteen of them, parents and children, praying at the bottom of the picture. When restorers tried to lift the overpaint the donors would not fully vanish, so they hover now like a faint second congregation, watching a suffering they were originally meant to share.