Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (mid 1700s): Art, History and Details

Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (mid 1700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Sebastiano Ricci (Italian, 1659–1734).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The subject originates in the Gospel of John 7:53-8:11, where Pharisees bring a woman accused of adultery to Christ, attempting to trick him into disobeying the Old Testament precept that she be stoned. In response, Christ interrupted his writing on the ground, stating: "Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her." The Pharisees, unable to retort, gradually disperse, and Christ eventually sends the woman away with an admonition not to sin again. The subject was popular in 18th-century Venice, partly because magnanimity was an important value, celebrated in visual, musical, and literary culture. The showy, exotic subject and the public presentation of an openly sexualized woman also enjoyed popularity in 18th-century Venetian painting. This work is a copy of the picture at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, perhaps by a student (and certainly not by Ricci himself)

Object facts

• Title: Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery
• Date: mid 1700s
• Creator attribution: Sebastiano Ricci (Italian, 1659–1734)
• Culture: Italy
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on canvas
• Dimensions: Framed: 54.6 x 64.8 x 8.9 cm (21 1/2 x 25 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.); Unframed: 34.6 x 43.5 cm (13 5/8 x 17 1/8 in.)
• Collection: P - Italian 18th Century
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1916.785

Collection credit

Holden Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Catalogue of Paintings, Part 3: European Paintings of the 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1982.
• Rubinstein-Bloch, Stella. Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings, Etc. Presented by Mrs. Liberty E. Holden to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1917.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.