Christ at the Column

Before he was crucified, Christ was fettered to a column and scourged. Here he is depicted as a heroic nude, bowing beneath the whips with his hands bound to the column (now lost) behind him. By nobly accepting suffering and death, Christ fulfilled the promise of mankind's salvation.

The redemptive majesty of Algardi's portrayals of Christ at the Column and Cristo Vivo reflects the positive spiritual message of the revitalized Catholic Church during the Baroque era. His idealized portrayal of Christ scourged contrasts with Reichle's earlier tormented rendering of the same subject. Algardi originally modeled this figure as the centerpiece of a group that included two flagellators.