Ambrogio Bergognone, The Agony in the Garden

Christ kneels in prayer on a grassy hillock dotted with flowers. He gazes up at an angel floating in the air before him, who presents him with a chalice containing the instruments of the Passion (Christ’s torture and crucifixion).

To the right, in a walled garden, three apostles sleep, heads resting on their hands; we can see John the Evangelist’s fair hair and Peter’s grey beard and balding head. Behind them, a group of soldiers, led by Judas, peers furtively through an arched gateway.

This is the Agony in the Garden, as told in the Gospel of Mark (14: 32–43). At Gethsemane, Christ – knowing that he has been betrayed and will die – takes Peter, James and John away from the other apostles and asks them to watch while he prays. As he asks God to ‘take away this cup from me’, the apostles repeatedly fall asleep and fail to see the soldiers who have come to arrest Christ. His distress is plain: crystal tears fall from his eyes, and beads of sweat form on his brow as he contemplates his imminent crucifixion.

This setting, however, is not first-century Palestine – it’s a beautiful morning in northern Italy in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. The sun is rising over the hills behind, lighting up the clouds in the clear blue sky and the upper leaves of the orange tree behind Christ. In the background the Last Supper is taking place in the open air on the terrace of a Renaissance house. Nearby, Christ and the three apostles make their way down a winding track to the garden, leaving the others behind. Renaissance artists often showed several episodes of a story in a single painting, as inThe Crucifixion: Central Panel or The Adoration of the Kings.

This small painting once formed part of a polyptych along with Christ carrying the Cross. They are the work of the Milanese painter Ambrogio Bergognone and probably date from 1501, the year inscribed on Christ carrying the Cross. At some point both panels were made into a triptych along with The Virgin and Child with Two Angels, which is perhaps by Ambrogio’s brother Bernardino.