The Scourging of Christ

The Scourging of Christ at the Pillar — one of the Passion's most physically explicit scenes — appears in this undated canvas at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Procaccini treated Passion subjects throughout his career, responding to Counter-Reformation demand for vivid devotional images that engaged worshippers emotionally with Christ's suffering. The Scourging offered painters the challenge of depicting sustained, methodical violence without either sanitising the theological truth or descending into gratuitous brutality. Procaccini's version likely navigates this by centering Christ's spiritual composure against the mechanical cruelty of his tormentors. The Boston MFA holds a significant collection of Italian Baroque religious works, acquired through the American art market of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when European ecclesiastical collections were dispersed at scale.

The Scourging's compositional demands — Christ at the pillar, tormentors on either side — create a symmetrical structure that Procaccini would animate through differentiated action and lighting. Christ's flesh, illuminated and white, contrasts with the darker tormentors in a chiaroscuro that has moral as well as visual function. The column against which Christ is bound provides a strong vertical axis.