Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple

Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple, undated and in Christ Church Oxford, depicts one of the rare moments in the Gospels where Jesus acts with open anger — overturning the tables of money-changers who had turned the Temple precincts into a marketplace. Christ Church's collections, formed through the university college's long history of acquiring artworks, preserve a number of significant Italian paintings including this Castiglione. The subject appealed to Counter-Reformation painters as a moral allegory of corruption and purification, and it gave Castiglione the rare opportunity to populate a religious scene with animals — the doves and cattle being sold in the Temple courts — in a way entirely justified by the scriptural text.

The scene's action and violence are conveyed through diagonal composition and energetic brushwork rather than explicit graphic detail. Christ's arm and whip create a strong sweeping diagonal from upper left to lower right. Scattered animals and overturned goods fill the foreground with the chaos of sudden disruption.