Curator
Michael Bell
From the museum website
An exciting opportunity to view a rare complete set of 14 engraved images of the Christian Passion narrative, created in 1521 by Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533), a Dutch master engraver. The Passion, with its well-known sequence of events leading up to and including Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, was a popular subject for 16th-century religious prints. The artist’s challenge was to respect the story’s established pictorial conventions while achieving a degree of particularity that would enhance the pictures’ effectiveness as devotional aids. Van Leyden’s clear and direct images are full of specificity and activity, inspiring the faithful to live in imitation of Christ through meditation on the events of his life.