Ecce Homo 1720 - 1762

François Joullain created this print, entitled “Ecce Homo,” in eighteenth-century France. The image depicts a biblical scene of Pontius Pilate presenting Christ to a crowd before his crucifixion. Prints like this played a crucial role in the cultural life of the time. They circulated images widely, acting as a form of visual media and a commodity. This print reproduces a painting by another artist, Charles-Antoine Coupel, and in doing so, makes the composition available to a broader public. We should consider the market for such images. Religious imagery remained popular in this period, but so too did prints that reproduced paintings from the royal collection. To understand the history of this print, we might look at the archives of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, the institution that dominated the French art world at the time. Understanding the print in its social and institutional context helps us to understand the complex public role of art in eighteenth-century France.