Christ Crowned with Thorns, from "The Passion of Christ"

Christ Crowned with Thorns, from "The Passion of Christ"

Jan Muller

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Towards the end of the sixteenth and early in the seventeenth century, Dutch Mannerists turned their attention to the Netherlandish master Lucas van Leyden and other northern Renaissance artists, creating a revival of interest in their works. Printmakers copied these earlier designs or made new compositions emulating the style of their predecessors. In about 1615-20, Jan Muller engraved copies of Lucas van Leyden’s 1521 series of the Passion of Christ, fourteen engravings illustrating Christ’s final days, from The Last Supper to The Resurrection. Muller’s copies are so deceptive that it takes extremely close looking and sometimes magnification to distinguish them from Lucas’s originals. Christ Crowned with Thorns is the seventh print in the series. Christ sits leaning forward, a robe around his shoulders, as two men force the crown of thorns onto his head. Another hands him a reed, in place of a king’s scepter.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Christ Crowned with Thorns, from "The Passion of Christ"Christ Crowned with Thorns, from "The Passion of Christ"Christ Crowned with Thorns, from "The Passion of Christ"Christ Crowned with Thorns, from "The Passion of Christ"Christ Crowned with Thorns, from "The Passion of Christ"

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.