Christ suffering (Christus patiens), crowned with thorns and recently brought down from the Cross, emerges from a marble tomb to display the bleeding wounds on his hands and ribcage. Behind him, two mournful angels hold the Cross and the three nails. The instruments of his Passion are neatly laid out all around, the hammer and tongs resting on the tomb, while standing out against the black background we see, from left to right, the lance that the Roman soldier Longinus used to pierce Christ’s ribs, the rod with a sponge soaked in vinegar offered to the Saviour in mockery shortly before his death, and the column of the flagellation.
We know of another two versions of this subject painted by Biagio d’Antonio, one in Faenza Cathedral and the other in Paris, the Paris version probably being the earliest in the series. The paintings differ only in a few minor variants and we cannot rule out the possibility that the artist may have used the same cartoon for some of the figures.
A document dated 1488 records a payment to Biagio d’Antonio for a “Pietà” (Christ the Man of Sorrows) painted for the Chapel of St. Paul in the Dominican church of Sant’Andrea in Faenza. For a long time, scholars associated the document with the Pinacoteca’s picture, but as Sauro Casadei has pointed out (in Bartoli, 1999), it should in fact be associated with the picture now on display in the Cathedral after hanging for a long time in its sacristy, because we know that Faenza Cathedral inherited quite a few of Sant’Andrea’s church furnishings. The Christus Patiens in the Pinacoteca, on the other hand, is more likely to have been painted for the venue in which it hung before joining the civic collections in 1879, namely the Banco del Monte di Faenza, an institute founded in 1491 whose emblem was precisely Christ suffering.
In stylistic terms, the painting reveals the influence on Biagio d’Antonio of the art of Domenico Ghirlandaio, with whom he worked on the frescoes on the side walls of the Sistine Chapel from 1481 to 1482. That influence shines through in particular in the sculptural, classicising construction of Christ’s body, but the meticulous handling of the figures’ hair and facial features still betrays the stylistic heritage of one of Biagio’s masters, Andrea del Verrocchio, while the dark background imbuing the scene with immense pathos points to Biagio’s admiration for Flemish painting, several examples of which could be admired in late 15th century Florence.
One source of inspiration to which Biagio may have turned for Jesus’s pose is a relief depicting Christ suffering, modelled by Luca della Robbia for the Federighi Tomb, now in Santa Trinita in Florence and datable to c. 1458. Yet at the same time, we should not forget that a composition portraying Christ suffering and supported by angels enjoyed considerable popularity on the Adriatic seaboard in the second half of the 15th century, the iconographical model for it being one Donatello’s reliefs for the high altar in the Basilica of St. Anthony in Padua. Biagio, however, marks a slight distance from that particular iconography by showing Christ not supported by angels but proudly upright with his gaze cast downwards, deep in thought.
19th century scholars attributed the panel to Andrea Utili or to Giovanni Battista Utili, two painters whose names recur with a certain frequency in the local 15th century archives. This erroneous attribution survived into the early 20th century, until Roberto Longhi, writing in 1934 in the wake of research conducted by Carlo Grigioni (1934), assigned the painting to Biagio d’Antonio.
