Arrest of Christ

Biagio d'Antonio painted this Arrest of Christ as part of the Sistine Chapel fresco cycle commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV around 1481-82. The chapel walls were painted by a team of Florentine and Umbrian masters — Botticelli, Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Rosselli — each contributing narrative panels on the lives of Moses and Christ in typological parallel. Biagio d'Antonio's Arrest depicted Judas's betrayal in Gethsemane — the turning point initiating the Passion — as a multi-figure night scene with soldiers, apostles, and the moment of the kiss that identified Christ to his captors. His contribution, alongside more celebrated contemporaries, formed part of the most ambitious papal decorative program of the fifteenth century.

Fresco on plaster at monumental scale within the chapel's coordinated wall program. The crowded multi-figure Arrest composition — soldiers with torches in the dark garden, Peter cutting off the servant's ear, Christ maintaining calm among the chaos — required managing many actors in compressed space at large scale.