c. 1480
Engraving, 167 x 117 mm
Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco
Schongauer's interest in the Passion culminated in a series of twelve scenes from the Prayer in the Garden to the Resurrection, which he executed about 1480. The Betrayal and Capture of Christ is typical of the compositions in the cycle with its cramped and crowded foreground pattern of figures. In general he abandoned the rhetoric of Rogier van der Weyden and Dieric Bouts in these prints and turned instead to more Germanic traditions for expressing the pathos and torture by bringing the figures up to the surface.
