The Last Supper; The Flagellation; A Praying Man: scenes from The Passion of Christ

The painted panels in the Wolsey Closet at Hampton Court are surviving fragments from more than one set of early 16th-century paintings telling the story of The Passion of Christ. The account of Christ's last days before his crucifixion was well known to all Christians and visual representations of this story could be seen in churches and important buildings across Europe. Artists followed accepted ways of portraying the events, often repeating the same elements of the story in order to meet the demands of religious and secular patrons who wanted to display visual proof of their own piety and faith.

The painted panels inserted into the south wall of the Wolsey Closet represent two scenes. The Flagellation shows the beginning of Christ's physical suffering on the road to his crucifixion: it was part of the Roman custom for a man sentenced to death to be whipped before he was crucified. There are distinct similarities in this painting with Sebastiano del Piombo's 1516 fresco of the same subject in Montorio in Italy, suggesting an Italian artist may have been responsible for some of the Wolsey Closet panels. Bartolommeo Penni was a 'Serjeant Painter' to Henry VIII in the 1530s and may be a candidate as The Flagellation has some resemblance to the work of his brother, Giovan Francesco Penni, in Santa Prassede, Rome.

The scene of The Last Supper represents the earlier moment in the story when Christ's disciples react to his sudden declaration that one of them is about to betray him. Such a painting is both a work of historic imagination and a reminder to Christians about their devotional responsibilities. The design is possibly copied from a well-known woodcut by the German artist Albrecht Dürer, suggesting that the unknown painter may have come from northern Europe. All the other paintings in the Wolsey Closet show Italian influences in their designs, and this is the only panel in the room which has not been re-used: conservation of the panels in the 1960s revealed earlier artworks of similar themes, dating from the late 15th or early 16th-centuries, underneath the visible paintings; the figure of a praying man on the left of this arrangement is one such artwork. This all suggests that The Last Supper was originally part of a separate series.

The panels have been in the Wolsey Closet at Hampton Court since at least the early 1700s, but could have been assembled from more than one other location and cut down to fit their new home. The artists, of both the earlier and later paintings, may have come from continental Europe, attracted to the courts of Henry VII or Henry VIII when the Tudor monarchs were seeking to establish and celebrate their supremacy through the expression of artistic and cultural magnificence.