Christ Crowned with Thorns, Gerard van Honthorst, c. 1622 – (Gerard Van Honthorst (Gerrit Van Honthorst)) ◄ prijašnji Sljedeći ►

Umjetnik: Gerard Van Honthorst (Gerrit Van Honthorst)

Datum: 1622

Veličina: 192 x 222 cm

Tehnika: Oil On Canvas

The only scholar to doubt the attribution of the present painting to Honthorst has been Braun.10 While others have viewed it as a work from the artist’s Italian period,11 Judson has made a good case for dating it to the first years of his return to Utrecht, specifically c. 1622.12 The composition of seven full-length figures is more ambitious than the concentrated treatments of the theme convincingly dated to Honthorst’s Italian period.13 The main diagonal formed by the silhouetted repoussoir figure, the figure of Christ, and the armoured soldier on the right compares best with the composition of the Death of Seneca, which was probably also executed in the 1620s.14 It was predominantly in the 1620s that Honthorst used covered artificial light sources, such as the torch in the present painting, one notable exception being the Denial of St Peter dated by Judson to around 1618.15 The intensity of the illumination is closest to that in the 1622 Dentist.16 The colour scheme, especially the use of mauve and blue, is also similar in these two works, while the Italian versions of The Crowning with Thorns are tonally more subdued. As Judson has pointed out, the boy dressed in blue and holding the torch in the Amsterdam painting also appears with a similarly illuminated face in the Dentist.17 Honthorst apparently used exactly the same figure – and again as the bearer of artificial illumination – for his Death of Seneca. The standing soldier on the right is compared by Judson to the 1623 Merry Violinist with Wineglass in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-180), and to the figure in a painting (probably a fragment) now in the Milwaukee Art Center,18 although it should be pointed out that a very similar figure, with a similar gorget and plumed helmet, already appears in the above-mentioned Denial of St Peter of c. 1618. The likelihood that the Rijksmuseum work was painted on commission for ‘Het Stadhuis van Hoorn’, a clandestine church in Amsterdam probably founded in the 1620s,19 also provides an argument in support of Judson’s dating. Although most probably executed in Utrecht, two depictions of Christ Crowned with Thorns in Rome were undoubtedly of great importance for Honthorst’s composition, that of Francesco da Ponte Bassano formerly in the Palazzo Barberini,20 and Rubens’s painting for Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.21 The boy holding a torch might have been derived from Bassano’s painting, and the tightly drawn shroud from Rubens’s work, while either or both paintings could have been the inspiration for the diagonal composition and kneeling foreground figure on the left. In most depictions of the Crowning with Thorns, Christ is shown bent over from the pain and humiliation of his ordeal. Uniquely, Honthorst’s Christ looks upward, perhaps towards God, for support. The standing soldier on the far left also looks upward, his laughter contrasting with Christ’s steadfast disposition. Both Matthias Stom and Jan Janssens painted scenes closely based on Honthorst’s painting.22 Neither, however, adopted the upward glances of Honthorst’s Christ and soldier. Jonathan Bikker, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 134.