Christ of the Mercy

Bartolomé Bermejo's Christ of the Mercy — the Man of Sorrows type showing Christ displaying his wounds — from around 1475 belongs to the Eucharistic and Passion-centred devotional culture of fifteenth-century Aragon, where graphic representations of Christ's suffering were understood as invitations to empathetic meditation and as visual supports for the central mystery of the Eucharist. Bermejo's treatment of the type brings to it the full resources of his Flemish oil technique, which allowed him to describe the wounds, the blood, and the five sacred lesions with a physical specificity no tempera painter could achieve. The Man of Sorrows was widely reproduced as a devotional image, and Bermejo's versions — he painted the subject more than once — circulated in Aragonese and Catalan churches as premium objects within a well-supplied market.

Bermejo renders the wounds with the clinical detail that Flemish devotional painting made conventional in northern Europe: the side wound, the crown of thorns punctures, the nail holes are each described with their specific depth and blood flow. The figure of Christ is set against a dark background that isolates the body and gives the wounds maximum visual contrast. Oil glazes build up the flesh tones to a luminosity that enhances the figure's paradoxical combination of suffering and divine radiance.