Christ as man of sorrows wept by mary and angels

Baldung's Christ as Man of Sorrows Wept by Mary and Angels from 1513 is a deeply devotional work—more concentrated and emotionally intense than many of his Passion subjects—that deployed the grieving Mary and attending angels as a vehicle for meditation on Christ's suffering. The Man of Sorrows type—Christ displaying his wounds and crown of thorns—was one of the most direct devotional images of Christ's sacrifice, designed to provoke the viewer's compassion through the combination of physical evidence of suffering and the direct gaze of the suffering Christ. Baldung's addition of the weeping Mary and angels enriched the standard devotional image with a theatrical quality of witnessed grief, and the 1513 date places this in the period when his devotional powers were preparing for the great Freiburg altarpiece of 1516.

The emotional intensity of the mourning figures is rendered with Baldung's characteristic expressiveness, the tears and grief depicted with vivid, almost disturbing directness.