Christ as Redeemer

This early Christ as Redeemer, dating to around 1498, shows the young Metsys before his move to Antwerp from his native Leuven. Campion Hall, the Jesuit permanent private hall at Oxford, holds this devotional panel that represents Metsys at the beginning of his career. The frontal, iconic presentation of Christ derives from Byzantine prototypes that persisted in Northern devotional art throughout the late medieval period. Metsys's religious paintings combine the Flemish tradition of meticulous naturalism with compositional ideas absorbed from Italian Renaissance models.

The early technique shows Metsys working in a relatively tight, linear manner before developing the softer modeling of his mature work. Christ’s face is rendered with careful symmetry, the hand raised in blessing painted with precise anatomical detail.