Christ on the Cold Stone

This devotional image, one of Gossart’s most popular pictures, exists in twenty surviving copies, bearing various titles. The theme provided an opportunity for the artist to render a muscular nude body and slightly bent-over torso based on the Belvedere Torso, which Gossart must have seen on his 1508-09 trip to Rome and likely recorded in a now-lost drawing.

Gossart was inspired by two prints by D�rer as he created this composition. One was the Man of Sorrows on the title page of the Large Passion, the other the Man of Sorrows by the Column from the Engraved Passion.

Among the large number of surviving copies are several that are signed indicating Gossart’s authorship of an original produced in 1527. A study of the painting in Budapest and New York leaves no doubt that the Budapest version is the original on which every copy is based.