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Jesus Christ in Art: A Collection at The Metropolitan Museum

  • Vikki Griffin

Vikki Griffin

•5 min read
European Sculpture and Decorative Arts / The Met

    The reliquary takes the architectural form of a two-story altar, with a shell niche in the upper story framing enameled figures of the Crucifixion.
    The lower story contains a rock-crystal cylinder displaying a cross that was believed to incorporate a fragment of the true cross, and the capsule below contains a supposed relic of the sponge held to Christ's mouth when he was on the cross.
    The upper mount of the cylinder is engraved "LIGNUM. CRUCIS. SPONGIA. SAL[UTA]IS" (The wood of the cross; the alleviating sponge).

Doge Alvise Mocenigo (1507–1577) Presented to the Redeemer

Italian, Venice 1518/19–1594 Venice / The Met

    This unfinished sketch records one stage of Tintoretto's preparation of a large votive painting of Doge Alvise Mocenigo destined for a room (the Sala del Collegio) in the Doge's Palace in Venice.
    Mocenigo ruled at the time of Venice's great victory at sea over the Turks, the Battle at Lepanto of 1571, represented in the sketch by the ships in the background, and during the ferocious plague of 1576 (which killed the painter Titian), after which he pledged to build the great church of the Redentore designed by Palladio.
    In the sketch the artist mapped out the principal figures, including rudimentary ideas for the figure of Saint Mark to the left of the kneeling Doge, and painted the silhouette of the saint's lion on a dark ground in the lower left.
    The beautiful figure of Christ at the left was completely rethought in the final composition.

Virgin and Child in an Apse

Netherlandish, ca. 1480 / The Met

    Next to Jan van Eyck, Robert Campin was one of the founders of early Netherlandish painting.
    This picture is among the earliest of over sixty variants that attest to the burgeoning cult of the Virgin during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the Burgundian Netherlands.

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