The Betrayal and Capture of Christ

The Betrayal and Capture of Christ (1515) at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach depicts the arrest in Gethsemane — Judas's kiss identifying Jesus to the soldiers, Peter cutting off Malchus's ear, the disciples beginning to flee. Cranach's treatment of this scene belongs to the tradition of Northern European Passion narrative painting that had developed through the fifteenth century in the altarpieces of van der Weyden, Memling, and their followers. The dynamic crowd scene — multiple figures in varied states of action and emotion, the darkness of night pierced by torchlight — challenged Cranach's compositional abilities in ways that his more static devotional images did not. The Norton Museum of Art, established in West Palm Beach in 1941 by Ralph Hubbard Norton and his wife Elizabeth Calhoun Norton, assembled a significant collection of European and American painting. The Cranach Betrayal scene demonstrates the museum's engagement with Northern Renaissance narrative painting alongside its other European holdings.

The panel shows Cranach's dramatic narrative handling with torchlit nocturnal atmosphere, dynamic figure interactions, and the vivid coloring that brings urgency to the arrest scene.