Seven Sorrows Polyptych: Christ among the Doctors

Christ among the Doctors, from the Seven Sorrows polyptych panels (around 1494), depicts the twelve-year-old Jesus teaching the Temple scholars — the only episode from Christ's childhood between the Nativity and the public ministry that the Gospels record. The subject fascinated Dürer because it combined the figure of Christ with the representation of learned argument — a group of men (the Temple doctors) engaged in intellectual disputation with a divine interlocutor. His later treatment of the subject in 1506 for the Ambrosiana Milan is one of his most celebrated works; this earlier version shows him approaching the same dramatic and theological challenge with the means available before his Italian experience.

The composition arranges the scholars around the young Christ in a semicircular formation, with Dürer's early style evident in the crisp drapery folds and carefully individualized facial expressions.