Hieronymus Bosch «Ecce Homo» 1476 or later, Städel Museum, Frankfurt

"Ecce Homo" is a painting of the episode in the Passion of Jesus by the Early Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch, made sometime after 1475. The original version, with a provenance in collections in Ghent, is in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt; a copy is held the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The painting takes its title from the Latin words Ecce Homo, "Behold the Man" spoken by the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate when Jesus is paraded before a baying, angry mob in Jerusalem before he is sentenced to be crucified.

Ecce Homo shows Jesus stripped and brought before the people by the members of the Roman council, who are flanked by soldiers. The people mock and jeer Jesus, who wears a Crown of Thorns. His hands are bound with shackles, while the redness of the now raw flesh on his legs, hands and chest attests to the fact that he has been beaten with a scourge. The dialogue between Pilate and the mob is indicated by three Gothic inscriptions placed near the mouths of the protagonists. These function in a similar manner to banderoles or the speech balloons used in modern comic strips. Typical of Bosch, the painting is suffused with symbolic imagery. Most notable are the placing two animals traditionally seen as emblems of evil in Christian iconography—an owl perched above Pilate, and a giant toad seen resting on the shield of one of the soldiers.

The upper right quadrant of the composition presents an all-but-autonomous cityscape that represents Jerusalem under the familiar guise of a Late Gothic Netherlandish town. Its large open spaces, eerily empty, form the strongest contrast to the densely packed jostle of grotesquely caricatured and exotically garbed figures of the foreground mob.

In the 1490s, Bosch painted a second version, the Ecce Homo, that is conserved in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Image: Hieronymus Bosch «Ecce Homo» is licensed under Public Domain

References:

Bax, Dirk. Ontcijfering van Jeroen Bosch. Den Haag, 1949

Fischer, Stefan. "Hieronymus Bosch. The Complete Works", Cologne 2013.

Gibson, Walter. Hieronymus Bosch. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1973. ISBN 0-500-20134-X