4. Early Netherlandish painting (15-16th c.)

The work is one of the highlights of the Netherlandish collection, a masterpiece of Flemish Renaissance painting. Karel van Mander wrote about its author in 1604 as follows: “Hemessen painted large figures and was in various respects highly proficient and unusual.” Here we can admire one of his unusual compositions with large figures, showing the monumentally rising, athletically built figure of Christ carrying the cross, suffering as a human and mocked by the soldiers depicted with caricaturistic distortions. On the left, Roman soldiers appear on a smaller scale. The fashion for large-figure composition was established by Flemish masters who had visited Italy. They are called Romanists, that is, masters who had been to Rome and who brought back with them the formal language of the Italian Renaissance. Though Hemessen never went to Italy, in his artistic orientation he adhered to this group. In keeping with Flemish traditions, he was also attracted by the moralizing representation of the comic. He executed several versions of this subject.