Tabula Magna: Agony in the Garden

Gabriel Angler's Tabula Magna depicting the Agony in the Garden, painted around 1445 and now in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, is part of a large Passion cycle altarpiece that represented one of the most ambitious painting commissions in mid-fifteenth-century Bavaria. Gabriel Angler was a Munich painter who produced devotional altarpieces for Bavarian churches and monasteries in the transition period between the late Gothic and the first infiltrations of Renaissance influence from the South.

Tempera and oil on panel. The night setting in the Garden is rendered with the deep, dark blue sky typical of German late Gothic painting's treatment of nocturnal scenes. Christ kneels in prayer while the three sleeping disciples are arranged in the foreground.