Christus als man van smarten staande aan de voet van het kruis 1520

Sebald Beham made this small engraving of Christ as the Man of Sorrows in 1520. Here we see Christ standing at the foot of the cross, wearing the crown of thorns, holding a chalice to collect blood from his wounds. Beham was a German artist working during the Reformation. His imagery drew on the widespread religious debates of the time, especially around the Eucharist and the symbolic importance of Christ’s blood. Here, Beham uses the relatively new medium of the engraving to spread his message to a wide audience, using the power of reproducible images to shape popular opinion. What did it mean to portray Christ as the Man of Sorrows? Was this designed to inspire empathy, or perhaps to comment on the social suffering of the artist's time? Questions like these require that we look beyond the image to the social conditions that gave rise to it. Historians rely on many kinds of documentary evidence to contextualize art, from theological tracts to records of book production.