Christ Presented to the People (c. 1480): Artwork and History

Christ Presented to the People (c. 1480) is in the Art Institute of Chicago collection. The museum lists its creator attribution as North Netherlandish.

The work and its context

The Art Institute of Chicago describes the work:

This is a rare example of a surviving 15th-century painting from the northern provinces of the Netherlands (present-day Holland). This region had fewer centers of artistic production than the more populous southern Netherlands, and it also experienced substantial destruction of artworks during the iconoclastic outbursts of the mid-16th century. The few surviving panel paintings, as well as illuminated manuscripts, from this region are often characterized by an earthy realism. Here the artist was equally interested in the hostile reactions of the crowd as he was in giving poignancy to the figure of Christ, whom the Roman governor Pontius Pilate presents to the people for judgment.

Object facts

• Title: Christ Presented to the People
• Date: c. 1480
• Artist attribution: North Netherlandish
• Place of origin: Northern Netherlands
• Medium: Oil on panel
• Dimensions: 51.9 × 34.8 cm (20 7/16 × 13 11/16 in.); Framed: 58.2 × 40.7 × 3.9 cm (22 7/8 × 16 × 1 1/2 in.)
• Type: Painting
• Department: Painting and Sculpture of Europe
• Reference number: 1933.1049

Collection credit

Mr. and Mrs. Martin A. Ryerson Collection

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The description above is credited to the Art Institute of Chicago and reused under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0; HTML formatting has been converted to plain text. Other catalogue metadata and the public-domain image are provided under CC0 1.0.