Crowned with thorns, he has fallen under the cross.
Bible in art · John
The Passion: Christ Carrying the Cross
Lucas van Leyden · 1521
The Cleveland Museum of Art
The ninth plate of Lucas van Leyden’s Passion of 1521, about 11.5 cm high. The heavy cross runs across the sheet in two strong bars.
Jesus, crowned with thorns, has fallen to his knees under the cross. A soldier drags him on by a rope. A woman kneels at the left with a cloth. Behind her stand mourners, and soldiers with shields and maces crowd at the right.
From the text
- Carrying His own cross, He went out to the Place of the Skull (John 19:17)
- Women followed, mourning and wailing for Him (Luke 23:27)
The artist’s own
- The woman with a cloth — by tradition Veronica, who wiped his face; she is not in the Gospels
- Jesus fallen under the cross — the Gospels do not tell of a fall
- A soldier pulling him by a rope
Details
Jesus
The woman with the cloth
By tradition Veronica.
The rope
A soldier pulls him on by a rope.
Mourners
Mourners stand behind.
Lucas van Leyden, Netherlandish, 1494–about 1533. The Cleveland Museum of Art (Dudley P. Allen Fund, 1923.55.9) · Engraving · Cleveland Museum of Art Open Access: Collection API record "share_license_status": "CC0" (Creative Commons Zero, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/).