Gevangenneming van Jezus 1661 - 1684

This print, titled 'Gevangenneming van Jezus' or 'The Arrest of Jesus', was made by an anonymous artist. We can situate the image in the Netherlands, likely sometime in the 17th century, given the style of engraving, the clothing of the figures, and the use of Latin in the inscriptions. The print depicts a dramatic scene of Jesus's betrayal and capture in the Garden of Gethsemane. Its imagery speaks to the fraught religious and political climate in the Netherlands at that time. The Dutch Republic was forging its own identity, and prints like this, often produced anonymously and in multiples, served as powerful tools for disseminating religious and moral ideas. To fully understand this work, we might turn to period religious texts, political pamphlets, and the records of printmakers' guilds to understand the social conditions that gave rise to such an image. Art history, after all, is inseparable from cultural and institutional history.