The Flagellation of Christ

The Flagellation of Christ, painted around 1450 and connected to Fra Angelico's Passion cycle, depicts the Roman punishment inflicted on Christ before the Crucifixion—a scene of physical suffering that posed artistic and theological challenges for painters committed to spiritual rather than graphic approaches to the Passion. Fra Angelico's contemporaries Piero della Francesca and later Luca Signorelli would explore the flagellation's spatial and psychological complexity; Fra Angelico's version prioritises the devotional function of the image over either spatial experimentation or graphic depiction of violence.

The flagellation requires depicting figures in active motion—the soldiers administering punishment—against the static suffering of Christ. Fra Angelico handles this through controlled poses rather than dynamic distortion, maintaining his characteristic compositional order even in scenes of violence. The column to which Christ is bound provides a stable vertical axis.