Christ on the Mount of Olives

Caravaggio painted Christ on the Mount of Olives around 1605, depicting the agony in the garden where Jesus, knowing what is to come, prays while his disciples sleep. The painting is known only through copies, the original lost, but those copies reveal a characteristic Caravaggesque treatment: the sleeping Peter prominent in the foreground, Christ kneeling in the middle ground receiving the comforting angel. Caravaggio's treatment of divine suffering always proceeds through the body — the postures and expressions of real people rather than devotional types — and the sleeping disciples' total incomprehension of the spiritual drama occurring beside them gives the scene a psychological realism unprecedented in the long tradition of Garden of Gethsemane imagery.

The composition contrasts Christ's upward-directed anguish with the unconscious disciples below, united by the strong diagonal light that models the figures with Caravaggio's characteristic sculptural clarity.