Pontius Pilate was the fifth governor of the Roman province of Judaea, serving under Emperor Tiberius from 26/27 to 36/37 AD. He is best known for being the official who presided over the trial of Jesus and ultimately ordered his crucifixion. Pilate's importance in Christianity is underscored by his prominent place in both the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds. Because the gospels portray Pilate as reluctant to execute Jesus, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church believes that Pilate became a Christian and venerates him as both a martyr and a saint, a belief which is historically shared by the Coptic Church, with a feast day on 19 or 25 June, respectively.
The Cloisters, also known as the Met Cloisters, is a museum in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, New York City. The museum, situated in Fort Tryon Park, specializes in European medieval art and architecture, with a focus on the Romanesque and Gothic periods. Governed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it contains a large collection of medieval artworks shown in the architectural settings of French monasteries and abbeys. Its buildings are centered around four cloisters—the Cuxa, Saint-Guilhem, Bonnefont and Trie—that were acquired by American sculptor and art dealer George Grey Barnard in France before 1913, and moved to New York. Barnard's collection was bought for the museum by financier and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. Other major sources of objects were the collections of J. P. Morgan and Joseph Brummer.
Thomas Pearsall Field Hoving was an American museum executive and consultant and the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Matthew 27 is the 27th chapter in the Gospel of Matthew, part of the New Testament in the Christian Bible. This chapter contains Matthew's record of the day of the trial, crucifixion and burial of Jesus. Scottish theologian William Robertson Nicoll notes that "the record of this single day is very nearly one-ninth of the whole book".
John 19 is the nineteenth chapter of the Gospel of John in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The book containing this chapter is anonymous, but early Christian tradition uniformly affirmed that John composed this Gospel. This chapter records the events on the day of the crucifixion of Jesus, until his burial.
Master Hugo was a Romanesque lay artist and the earliest recorded professional artist in England.
Ante Topić Mimara was a controversial Croatian art collector and philanthropist. He donated his collection of more than 3,700 artifacts, ranging from the prehistoric to the 20th century periods to the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade and the Mimara Museum in Zagreb. Most masterpieces of the Italian Collection and Dutch Collection in the National Museum of Serbia had been donated by Mimara.
Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) is a 1954 oil-on-canvas painting by Salvador Dalí. A nontraditional, surrealist portrayal of the Crucifixion, it depicts Christ on a polyhedron net of a tesseract (hypercube). It is one of his best-known paintings from the later period of his career.
The Batlló Majesty is a large 12th-century Romanesque wooden crucifix, now in the National Art Museum of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain. It is one of the most elaborate examples in Catalonia of an image of Christ on the Cross, symbolizing his triumph over death.
Ecclesia and Synagoga, or Ecclesia et Synagoga in Latin, meaning "Church and Synagogue", are a pair of figures personifying the Church and the Jewish synagogue, that is to say Judaism, found in medieval Christian art. They often appear sculpted as large figures on either side of a church portal, as in the most famous examples, those at Strasbourg Cathedral. They may also be found standing on either side of the cross in scenes of the Crucifixion, especially in Romanesque art, and less frequently in a variety of other contexts.
Crucifixions and crucifixes have appeared in the arts and popular culture from before the era of the pagan Roman Empire. The crucifixion of Jesus has been depicted in a wide range of religious art since the 4th century CE, frequently including the appearance of mournful onlookers such as the Virgin Mary, Pontius Pilate, and angels, as well as antisemitic depictions portraying Jews as responsible for Christ's death. In more modern times, crucifixion has appeared in film and television as well as in fine art, and depictions of other historical crucifixions have appeared as well as the crucifixion of Christ. Modern art and culture have also seen the rise of images of crucifixion being used to make statements unconnected with Christian iconography, or even just used for shock value.
In the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as the King of the Jews, both at the beginning of his life and at the end. In the Koine Hellenic of the New Testament, e.g., in John 19:3, this is written as Basileus ton Ioudaion.
The crucifix of Ferdinand and Sancha is an ivory carving from circa 1063, today in the National Archaeological Museum of Spain, in Madrid. It was part of an offering by King Ferdinand I of León and Queen Sancha to furnish the basilica of San Isidoro de León. It is the earliest known crucifix from Spain depicting the body of Christ. Although earlier Spanish crucifixes of gold, ivory and wood are known, they are all without images. The official inventory of the royal gift describes the crucifix as "a cross of ivory with the image of our crucified Redeemer". It measures 52 cm high, 34.5 cm wide, and 1 cm thick, with the width of the cross beams being 7 cm. The image of Christ is 305 mm tall.
Quod scripsi, scripsi is a Latin phrase. It was most famously used by Pontius Pilate in the Bible in response to the Jewish priests who objected to his writing "King of the Jews" on the sign (titulus) that was hung above Jesus at his Crucifixion. It is mostly found in the Latin Vulgate Bible.
Prayer bead with the Adoration of the Magi and the Crucifixion is a small south Netherlandish prayer nut, carved in fine-grained boxwood, dated c. 1500–1510. It is now in the collection of The Cloisters, New York. Originally the bead would have been part of a complete rosary set, and its size suggests its use as an Ave bead, where the supplicant would recite the "Hail Mary". Objects of this type were in great demand in the early sixteenth century. Apart from use in private veneration, they could be worn as necklaces or hung from belts as fashionable accessories. The exceptional craftsmanship of this example indicates that it was intended for a member of the high nobility. J. P. Morgan donated the bead to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1917.
Gothic boxwood miniatures are very small Christian-themed wood sculptures produced during the 15th and 16th centuries in the Low Countries, at the end of the Gothic period and during the emerging Northern Renaissance. They consist of highly intricate layers of reliefs, often rendered to nearly microscopic level, and are made from boxwood, which has a fine grain and high density suitable for detailed micro-carving. There are around 150 surviving examples; most are spherical rosary beads, statuettes, skulls, or coffins; some 20 are in the form of polyptychs, including triptych and diptych altarpieces, tabernacles and monstrances. The polyptychs are typically 10–13 cm (3.9–5.1 in) in height. Most of the beads are 10–15 cm (3.9–5.9 in) in diameter and designed so they could be held in the palm of a hand, hung from necklaces or belts, or worn as fashionable accessories.
Prayer nuts or Prayer beads are very small 16th century Gothic boxwood miniature sculptures, mostly originating from the north of today's Holland. They are typically detachable and open into halves of highly detailed and intricate Christian religious scenes. Their size varies between the size of a walnut and a golf ball. They are mostly the same shape, decorated with carved openwork Gothic tracery and flower heads. Most are 2–5 cm in diameter and designed so they could be held in the palm of a hand during personal devotion or hung from necklaces or belts as fashionable accessories.
Miniature Altarpiece with the Crucifixion is a very small and complex early 16th century Netherlandish microcarved miniature sculpture in boxwood, now in The Cloisters, New York. The central carvings of the upper triptych show the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus; each outer wing contains two scenes from the biblical Old Testament. The complex base contains a round carving which opens like a boxwood prayer nut.
Adam Dircksz is the name ascribed by some art historians to a highly influential Dutch sculptor whose workshop is often attributed with the creation of around 60 of the c. 150 extant Gothic boxwood miniature micro-carvings. Other historians prefer to attribute various unrelated artists who are given individual or grouped notnames. It may be that the master was the innovator in this style of sculpture, and that similar works were directly inspired. According to the British Museum, Dircksz may have served "elite patrons in the circle of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, with a strong link to Delft."
The Miniature Altarpiece is a Gothic boxwood miniature in the form of a small altarpiece, made in the Netherlands c. 1520–1530, probably by the workshop of Adam Dircksz, about whom almost nothing is known. It has been held by the Louvre since 1901, but is not on public display. It was displayed with other boxwood miniatures in 2016–17 in an exhibition that visited the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Rijksmuseum.
