About this work
The scene is dense and airless, the figures pressed close to the picture plane with nowhere to retreat. We witness the moment immediately after Judas has betrayed Christ with a kiss — the second before a rope is tightened around his neck and the Passion begins.
The sense of motion on the right contrasts superbly with the awful stillness at the left of the canvas.
Judas is no ill-favoured villain of medieval tradition but a simple, middle-aged man, his hair going grey, lines etched into his face — and yet the lamp Guercino uses to such dramatic effect illuminates his guilt by revealing the money bag clasped in his left hand, the thirty pieces of silver paid for his evening's work.
The jeering soldiers to the right — young, old and middle-aged — are vividly characterised.
Guercino interprets this crucial event in the Christian story as an essentially human drama. The palette cleaves to the Baroque night: deep ochres, cold armour, a single flare of lit flesh at centre canvas. There is no celestial mercy — only the press of bodies and consequence.
Guercino's original was painted in 1621 or before, in oil on canvas.
It dates from the 1620s, when the young artist was at the apex of his artistic output and strongly influenced by the dramatic lighting of Caravaggio.
The similarities between Guercino's composition and Caravaggio's own *Taking of Christ* are indisputable — Guercino travelled to Rome in May 1621, where he would undoubtedly have viewed a number of Caravaggio's compositions. Etty's copy, now held at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, belongs to a lifelong practice of engaging the Old Masters through paint rather than study alone. His development of the ability to copy other works served him in good stead when he came to copy elements from the Old Masters.
Etty painted what he called "memorials" honouring heroes such as Titian, Rubens, Poussin and others — his approach one of humility, always seeking to learn. In tackling Guercino's charged nocturne, Etty was testing his own handling of darkness and flesh against one of the seventeenth century's most searching religious compositions.
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