Capture of Jesus Christ

Capture of Jesus Christ, painted around 1440 and now at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, depicts the arrest in the garden of Gethsemane — Judas's kiss identifying Christ to the soldiers, the disciples fleeing, Peter cutting off the ear of Malchus. The Betrayal and Capture were among the most narratively dense scenes in the Passion, compressing multiple simultaneous actions into a single moment. The Wallraf-Richartz attribution connects this work to the Cologne-Rhineland tradition, even if it was produced by the same workshop responsible for the Karlsruhe Small Passion panels, suggesting that the master had clients across the Rhine valley.

Tempera on panel. The Capture's compositional complexity — soldiers with torches and weapons, fleeing disciples, the Judas kiss, the Malchus incident — requires careful organisation of overlapping figure groups. The nocturnal setting adds atmospheric complexity beyond the usual daylit Passion scenes.