The Taking of Christ
The original, as its museum records it
Every line above is reproduced from the holding institution’s own catalogue entry, which is linked. Where their title, date or attribution differs from ours, theirs is the one printed here.
The file this print is made from
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About this painting
Only the moon lights it. The man at the right holds a lantern that lights nothing, and his face is Caravaggio's own, aged thirty-one. Every hand laid on him grips; Christ's own are laced, in what Santurri calls a prayerful attitude broken by violence.
Painted for Ciriaco Mattei in 1602, 125 scudi, its authorship lost for a century and a half. It hung in the dining room of the Jesuit house on Leeson Street in Dublin, taken for a Honthorst. It had been given to the fathers in the 1930s by a doctor, Marie Lea-Wilson, whose husband was shot dead in the street in 1920 and who was consoled by one of them. She died in 1971 without ever knowing what she had given away.
A conservator recognised it in 1990.
Sources: National Gallery of Ireland, 'The Taking of Christ', L.14702. · Marie Lea-Wilson, her husband’s death in 1920, the gift to the Jesuits · Rudolph & Ostrow, "Isaac Laughing," Art History 24:5 (2001) · Edmund N. Santurri, 'A Caravaggio Meditation', The Cresset (Lent 2013).
And Jesus said to him: Friend, whereto art thou come? Then they came up and laid hands on Jesus and held him.
Matthew 26:50 · Douay-Rheims (Challoner), from the project’s own corpus at data/bible_drc.js
Printed on demand. Public-domain masterwork, reproduced from a 9,893 px master of the original. The whole image is printed — never cropped to fit the sheet — so every sheet carries an archival margin, and the dimensions and resolution listed above are the ones you receive.