Betrayal of Christ, from The Engraved Passion,

1508

The Passion of Christ—the narrative of Jesus’s crucifixion and the events leading up to it—includes the pivotal nighttime episodes of his betrayal by his disciple Judas and subsequent arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. Dürer made two small-scale Passion print series, which demonstrate the diverse pictorial and expressive potentials of the woodcut and engraving techniques. In both depictions, Dürer adhered to the convention of combining Jesus’s betrayal and arrest into one scene. He also inserted an incident involving another disciple: Simon Peter cuts off the ear of Malchus, shown holding a lantern, in an attempt to prevent Jesus’s arrest. Although the tonal effects achieved in the engraving are more refined than those in the woodcut, Dürer departed from tradition in both works by delineating the darkness of the sky, which earlier northern printmakers had left blank.