Correggio, Christ presented to the People (Ecce Homo)

Correggio shows Christ bound and crowned with thorns at the moment when he is condemned to be crucified by Pontius Pilate. In the New Testament, ‘Ecce Homo’ (‘Behold the man’) were the words used by Pilate when he presented Christ to the people before the Crucifixion (John 19: 2–5). Pilate, wearing a turban, stands in the background, his hand in a rhetorical gesture to indicate that he is speaking. Correggio’s Pilate seems to derive from the print of the same subject in Dürer’s engraved Passion (British Museum, London).

Christ’s mother, the Virgin Mary, swoons and is supported by Saint John the Evangelist, wearing his traditional colours of red and green. The soldier to the right looks at Christ with an expression of respect tinged with love, as though conversion is dawning on him. He may be Longinus, the centurion who recognised Christ’s divinity when he was on the Cross.

During Correggio’s time, it was common in paintings of this subject to put the viewer in the place of the crowd who condemned him to death – the position we occupy here, as his judges. However, the swooning Virgin is not mentioned in the Gospel accounts of this episode and is not usually represented. She is more commonly shown swooning in images of Christ carrying the Cross – for example, Boccaccio Boccaccino’s Christ carrying the Cross and the Virgin swooning of about 1501 and Raphael’s famous Spasimo di Sicilia (Prado, Madrid). Correggio was probably inspired by the frontispiece of Dürer’s Small Engraved Passion, which shows Christ crowned with thorns with the Virgin and Saint John. Correggio’s Virgin scrapes her nails along the parapet as she falls backwards, a detail unique to this painting.

This is the last of the surviving pictures of the Passion that Correggio painted during the 1520s. Its patron is unknown, but the painting was owned by the Prati family in Parma when Agostino Carracci engraved it in 1587, and it may have been commissioned by them. We do not know exactly when it was painted, but it influenced a fresco by Francesco Maria Rondani in Parma Cathedral which was completed in 1531, so it must have been before that date. Parmigianino seems to have been familiar with the composition before he moved to Rome in 1524, as a drawing by him now in the Courtauld Institute, London, appears to be related to Correggio’s figures of the Virgin and Saint John. Parmigianino’s Virgin is closer to Correggio’s first idea for the Virgin, which is invisible in the final version of the painting but revealed in X-ray images.

X-ray images also show many other changes were made while the picture was being painted, especially to the figure of Christ. Correggio changed the position of Christ’s hands, exposed more of his torso and altered the expression on his face to one of extreme sorrow to appeal to our pity, love and compassion. It is possible that Correggio worked on the painting over several years. A lost drawing by Correggio dating from 1524, now known through an eighteenth-century print by Francesco Rosapina (British Museum, London), may have been Correggio’s first idea for the picture and was perhaps the version of the composition that Parmigianino saw.