The Man of Sorrows

Devotional woodcuts were heavily used in 15th-century Europe, variously folded and carried as talismans, pasted on bedroom walls, and kept in family Bibles. While hundreds were printed at the time, only a handful of impressions have survived to today. The only remaining extant copy of the image, this impression was pasted into the frontispiece of a book from a German Augustine nunnery, where viewers would have imagined Christ’s pain through repeated study and imitation. The woodcut offers an intensely personal focal point of meditation on Christ’s suffering. Like the nearby Thirteen Buddhas (1925.1697), he appears as a floating vision. Nearly naked after his Crucifixion, blood streams from his nail wounds and crown of thorns.