The lavish gilding and overall elegance of the figures hardly seem in keeping with the brutal violence of the event. A small seventeenth-century gilt-bronze group by the Roman sculptor Alessandro Algardi depicts the flagellation of Christ in a surprisingly beautiful way. Having been condemned, Christ was taken away to be tortured by the Roman soldiers. We are implicated in the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy. We are cast as the crowd who choose Barabbas over the Son of God. Pilate and Christ – his hands bound – now stare directly at the viewer of the print. But in the state illustrated here, these figures have been removed. In an earlier state of the print Rembrandt included a crowd immediately beneath the balcony upon which Pilate and his prisoners stand. In his 1655 print, Christ presented to the people, the Dutch artist Rembrandt depicts the moment described in the Gospel of Matthew, 27, 21–3, when Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, offers the people of Jerusalem the chance to grant amnesty to either Christ or Barabbas, a common criminal. The halo is sometimes obscured by the crown of thorns. In art, from the early middle ages and beyond, Christ is shown increasingly as a god of flesh, a divine figure who nevertheless bleeds, sheds tears of compassion, feels pain. 1182–1226), who himself miraculously suffered stigmata – the wounds of Christ – was particularly influential on this strand of medieval piety. During the middle ages, there was an increasing emphasis upon the humanity of Christ, particularly in the events leading up to his Crucifixion. In this, one of the most vivid prophecies of Christ in the Old Testament, Isaiah describes a pitiful, vulnerable saviour. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him and with his stripes we are healed. He was despised and rejected of men a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
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