014

  • Christ on the Mount of Olives from The Passion

  • ca. 1480
  • Martin Schongauer (Alsatian ca. 1430-1491)
  • Engraving
  • 16.3 x 11.4 cm., 6-7/16 x 4-7/16" image
  • Catherine Carter Goebel, Paul A. Anderson Chair in the Arts Purchase in Honor of Dr. Mary Em Kirn, Paul A. Anderson Art History Collection, Augustana College 2002.11

Essay by Mary Em Kirn, Professor Emerita of Art History

Printmaking, as an artistic means of expression, appears for the first time in Western Europe in the 1420s in a creative explosion of woodcuts and then engravings that appealed to a broad audience. Creating an engraved image was technologically complex and the delicate lines, subtle shading, textural variations and spatial complexities found in engravings were impossible to achieve in contemporary woodcuts.

Martin Schongauer was the most important engraver in northern Europe during the third quarter of the 15th century and his work was greatly admired (Landau & Parshall 50-56). We know that the young Albrecht Dürer visited Schongauer's studio in Colmar in 1492, just months after Schongauer's death. Scholars believe that Dürer saw most, if not all, of Schongauer's engravings, including the twelve images from the Passion series. This series begins with Christ on the Mount of Olives and ends with the Resurrection (Shestack, Nos. 24-35).

In Christ on the Mount of Olives, Schongauer exhibited his ability to clearly relate a complex narrative. In the foreground, three of Christ's disciples have fallen asleep despite being admonished by Christ to pray. The bald St. Peter reclines with a sword clasped in his right hand. The young St. John the Evangelist rests his head on his Gospel and St. James, with his dark curly beard, props his head on his hand. They are unaware of Christ's agony as he kneels in prayer behind them. Christ gazes at an angel holding a cloth-covered chalice, referencing his future sacrifice on the cross as well as the Eucharistic wine.

Although Christ is positioned in mid-space, he dominates this composition because he is physically raised above both the disciples in the foreground and Judas and his entourage of soldiers, coming around the tall outcropping of rocks, in the background. Judas clutches a moneybag filled with thirty pieces of silver as he searches for Christ who will be led away to be questioned and tortured in the next engraving in this series of narrative images on the Passion.