Lot 1008 R α

It is hard to imagine a more intense, haunting depiction of the suffering Jesus than this devotional painting: Christ, crowned with thorns, is depicted in radical close-up, flanked by Pontius Pilate on the right and a henchman on the left. Only the heads and shoulders of the figures are visible, there are no decorative additions, no narrative detail, the colouring is muted and reduced. Nothing distracts from the function of this painting: to lead the viewer to compassion, to sympathise.
This panel has rightly been described as one of Hans Hoffmann's most successful works. The artist obviously worked intensively on this pictorial theme; although only a few of Hoffmann's works have survived, there are several versions of the Ecce Homo, including one in the Suermondt-Ludwig Museum in Aachen. Hans Hoffmann was able to find models for such devotional pictures in German, Dutch and Italian painting. The astonishingly intense close-up views used by Andrea Mantegna and Andrea Solario, for example, and the Ecce Homo depictions of Dutch artists such as Jan Mostaert and Quentin Massys. Another source of inspiration was undoubtedly the great Albrecht Dürer, who influenced the sketch for the head of Jesus, which has been preserved in a private collection.
Albrecht Dürer - the great artist of the German Renaissance - was Hans Hoffmann's role model and is known to have shaped his artistic career. Coming from Nuremberg like Dürer, he became a great authority on his work, and it was this knowledge that propelled him to the position of court painter at the Imperial Court in Prague. Hoffmann assembled an important collection of Dürer's works for Rudolf II and produced copies, variants and adaptations that testify to Hoffmann's outstanding skill as an artist (fig. 1; Lempertz, 17th May 2008, lot 1081). Alongside Rudolf II, Hans Hoffmann thus became a protagonist of the artistic movement in the second half of the 16th century known as the Dürer Renaissance.
Due to Netherlandish pictorial influences, the painting has been attributed to Jan van Hemessen in the past, but Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Princeton, has confirmed the authorship of Hans Hoffmann. The urgency of the depiction, Hoffmann's intense preoccupation with the subject and the painterly execution make it a central work in the artist's oeuvre.