Christ on the Mount of Olives c. 1460

This small, undated picture shows Christ praying on the Mount of Olives, made by an unknown hand. The scene is an intimate moment of contemplation before the Passion, the figures arranged in a small space. We might see the historical context of its creation in the styles and conventions of the image. Notice the use of color, typical of late medieval art in Europe, and the way that the emotional intensity of the scene is highlighted by the simple composition. The gospel story is here translated into visual form, and we can only speculate as to whether this was produced for the institutional church, or for private devotion. We can see it was made for the purposes of instruction, or perhaps to encourage a personal identification with Christ’s suffering. The historian can only begin to understand the meanings of the art, by looking to its social and institutional context, using historical documents to work out how the image operated in its time. Ultimately, the significance of the artwork lies in its complex relationship to the culture that produced it.