Wolf Huber, Christ taking leave of his Mother

Very few paintings by Huber survive and this is the only one in a British public collection. The subject of Christ bidding farewell to his mother, the Virgin Mary, as he heads to Jerusalem to face his arrest, trial and death is not recorded in the Gospels. But from 1500 it was a very popular image in northern Europe, and particularly in southern Germany, where Wolf Huber and his contemporary Albrecht Altdorfer lived.

This is a fragment of a larger painting which has been cut at the right edge – only Christ’s hands and part of his long crimson robe remain. The main focus of the image is the swooning Virgin Mary, who has collapsed into the arms of her companions. The composition, with the holy women to the left and Christ standing to the right, is similar to a version of the scene by Altdorfer: Christ taking Leave of his Mother.

Dendrochronology has revealed that the wooden panel on which the image is painted comes from a tree that was felled in 1508. Panels were usually painted ten years after the tree was cut down, so it is likely this work was painted in around 1520. Here Huber has developed an earlier version of the same subject that he made in 1519 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), which shows a broader view of the figures, with Mary kneeling, begging Christ not to leave. The smaller scale of those figures means that there is less focus on their facial expressions, while in this picture he has described the women’s grief more clearly with a close-up view. He seems to have reused the grouping of the women from our picture in his Lamentation (mourning over Christ’s body) dated to 1524 (Louvre, Paris), in which the woman leaning forward on the left is substituted by Saint John the Evangelist in a similar pose.

Huber was skilled at expressing emotion through gesture and this is probably his most expressive and dramatic image. He may have been inspired by Altdorfer’s painting, which was made slightly earlier, in both the arrangement of the figures and the nervous energy expressed through the rippling drapery folds; those around the Virgin’s neckline are by far the most agitated, as in Altdorfer’s version.

The original function of the painting is not yet known, but its large size suggests it was made for a public setting. It might have formed part of a funerary monument–there are contemporary examples of sculptures of the same subject adorning tombs.