Christ Being Crowning with Thorns
Maarten van Heemskerck (Netherlandish, 1498–1574)
1546-1549
- Medium
- Pen, brown ink, faint traces of black chalk on yellowish paper. Traces of ruling pen and squaring
- Classification
- Drawing
- Dimensions
- height 255 mm, width 204 mm
- Culture
- Netherlandish
- Museum
- SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
- Rights
- Public Domain Mark: SMK waives its rights in this photograph, as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the SMK – National Gallery of Denmark
About this work
This drawing is one of many studies for a series of etchings, the exact number of which remains a bone of contention among scholars. One expert lists 24 prints, another 28. No direct link between the series' drawings Apart from a certain motivic consistency, there is no direct link between the drawings in the series. There are no cliffhangers to maintain suspense until the end. And indeed, the spectators’ familiarity with the good old Biblical tales would undoubtedly impede any attempt at making surprising plot twists. The pictures are tableaux with moralising intentions. The dramatic culmination A common feature of Heemskerck’s narrative drawings is the fact that they depict a dramatic culmination intensified by the stylistic transition from the Italian High Renaissance to the Northern European Mannerist style. Many of the muscular backs, bearded prophet-like figures and voluptuous Sibyls are taken directly from Michelangelo, the much admired counsel of perfection. Here, however, the figures have been placed in rooms of crooked angles and distorted perspectives, threateningly closing themselves around the actors, many of them apparently suffering from lumbago or…
