A coroação de espinhos

In June 1605 Caravaggio sat down and wrote out a contract in his own hand, promising a client a picture of the same size and value as the one he had already made for him of Christ's crowning. That line is why this canvas is dated to just before it, around 1604. The buyer was Massimo Massimi, a wealthy Roman financier who moved in the circle of Caravaggio's great patron Vincenzo Giustiniani. Whether the brush was entirely Caravaggio's own is still debated. The pose of Christ leans on a Rubens altarpiece, and the soldier with the staff behind him on Titian's version of the scene. For years the painting hung in a bank's collection in Prato, in Tuscany, before the bank's own collapse sent the pictures north to Vicenza.