Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (1522–26): Art, History and Details

Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (1522–26) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Everhard Rensig (German); Gerhard Remisch (German).

The work and its context

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

These two stained glass panels originally belonged to an extensive program of Old and New Testament subjects that originally decorated the cloister of the Cistercian Abbey of Mariawald, near Cologne, Germany. The original placement of glass at Mariawald involved windows composed of two openings. Each comprised three large glass panels plus a smaller tracery panel. Two scenes in each window represented Old Testament subjects (below) and the New Testament (above). Above the biblical narrative panels were smaller messenger panels depicting images of prophets with scrolls. At the base of each window were donor and patron saint panels. In this way, the Old Testament was shown to prefigure the events of the New. These two panels depicting scenes of Christ’s Passion were originally located in the north corner of the east cloister gallery with the Kiss of Judas on the left, and Christ in Gethsemane on the right. Mariawald was founded in 1480 and closed in 1802 when the stained glass windows were removed. Other panels from the series are preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Recent scholarship has attributed the glass to the Rhenish glass painters Everhard Rensig or Gerhard Remisch.

Object facts

• Title: Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane
• Date: 1522–26
• Creator attribution: Everhard Rensig (German); Gerhard Remisch (German)
• Culture: Germany, Cologne
• Type: Glass
• Technique: pot-metal and white glass, silver stain and sanguine
• Dimensions: Overall: 73.7 x 71.8 cm (29 x 28 1/4 in.)
• Collection: MED - Renaissance
• Department: Medieval Art
• Accession number: 1940.340.1

Collection credit

Gift of S. Livingstone Mather, Constance Mather Bishop, Philip R. Mather, Katherine Hoyt Cross, and Katherine Mather McLean in accordance with the wishes of Samuel Mather

Further reading listed by the museum

• Milliken. William. "Objects from the Samuel Mather Collection." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 28, no. 3 (March 1941): 36-40.

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.