Man of sorrows

Created: around 1600

Material, technology: poplar wood, with old canvas on reverse

Size: 35 x 26.5 cm

Description: The face of Christ crowned with thorns, looking upwards, inspires contemplation and compassion in the viewer. The Vir Dolorum type of representating Christ spread in the late Middle Ages, and was also used by the renaissance and early baroque. A considerable part of Hoffmann’s oeuvre consists of copies and variations of Dürer’s compositions. Research attributed to him the Christ head showing Dürer’s Man of Sorrows of 1514, which enjoyed great popularity for a long time and then disappeared, surviving only in innumerable copies. The Pannonhalma picture is also a derivant of Dürer’s composition of great popularity at the end of the 16th century and a notable relic of the later Dürer revival.