Christ Crowned with Thorns

This panel painting with gold background has a semicircular top edge and depicts a half-length image of Christ wearing a scarlet robe with hands clasped relatively high on his chest and crowned with thorns. The Latin inscription on the lower front edge of the frame, which states PER VIA ATENDITE ET VIDETE is the second half of the text of Lamentations 1:12, "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow." Christ faces forward and his emotive face is inclined towards his right, the viewer's left, with his gaze also turned towards the same direction. These factors indicate that the painting was originally the right painting in a pair or diptych, and it can easily be surmised that the pendant work would have been an image of the Grieving Madonna inscribed with the first half of the text, "is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by" .Here Christ is shown wearing a long-sleeved scarlet robe, with hands clasped in front of his chest. This pose differs from that of the "Ecce Homo" image with his hands widespread, and also diverges from the "Man of Sorrows" image with its lack of his wounds. According to Panofsky, this new type of Christ iconography known as the "Imago Salvatoris Coronati," combining the Salvator Mundi with Christ suffering the Passion, was created by Dirk Bouts. Members of Bouts' studio made a number of copies of this image to be paired with images of the Grieving Madonna. According to Schöne, this painting is one of the best replicas of the original Bouts painting thought to have been created around 1450. The red-eyed figure of Christ, crying as he suffers, combined with the crying figure of the Madonna reflects the careful finishing of details and the sentimentalism-laden religious sensibility characteristic of Bouts and early Flemish painting.(Source: Masterpieces of the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, 2009, cat. no. 7)