The Passion: Christ in Limbo (c. 1480): Art, History and Details

The Passion: Christ in Limbo (c. 1480) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Martin Schongauer (German, c. 1450–1491).

The work and its context

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

Martin Schongauer's series The Passion of Christ was his largest set of engravings, made around 1480, and extensively copied across Europe. It consists of 12 prints detailing the suffering of Christ in the last days of his life. Schongauer's version focuses on crowded scenes, grotesque physiognomies of Christ's tormentors, and great pathos in the compositions. Here, Schongauer represented the episode in which Christ, between his death and resurrection, descended into Limbo to bring salvation to the righteous ones who had died before him. Christ majestically strides over a vanquished demon crushed under his foot, and holds Adam's hand with his left hand.

Object facts

• Title: The Passion: Christ in Limbo
• Date: c. 1480
• Creator attribution: Martin Schongauer (German, c. 1450–1491)
• Culture: Germany
• Type: Print
• Technique: engraving
• Dimensions: Sheet: 16.5 x 11.7 cm (6 1/2 x 4 5/8 in.)
• Collection: PR - Engraving
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 2015.20

A detail from the museum

This image of Christ trampling a monstrous demon and piercing it with his cross recalls the one of Archangel Michael in another print by Martin Schongauer (1952.99).

Collection credit

Norman O. Stone and Ella A. Stone Memorial Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art. Museum Masters: 2016-17 Companion Guide. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2016.
• Lemonedes, Heather. “Acquisitions 2015: Prints.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 56, no. 2 (March/April 2016): 22-23.

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.