After Bosch’s Christ Crowned with Thorns also known as Christ Mocked, this painting retains the brutal symmetry of the original—Christ surrounded, scrutinised, condemned—but introduces a subtle, devastating transformation. Over time, the surface itself begins to wrinkle and warp. The image doesn’t just depict suffering; it physically absorbs it.
The original, painted around 1490, was a meditation on cruelty, conviction, and divine silence. This version, rendered in thick oil, rewires that legacy for the age of acceleration. We are no longer in a world of slow martyrdom. The distortions that now ripple across Christ’s face unfold like an analog glitch—an analogue body caught in a digital world.
In that slow degradation, a question forms: Can religion—any belief system—survive the velocity of our technological future? Can the sacred endure the surfaces of screen culture, surveillance, and ceaseless reproduction?
The painting suggests not disappearance, but mutation. The face remains. But what it once promised—truth, stillness, transcendence—has been melted into something anxious and unresolved. As in The Icarus Stain or Wrestling with Angels, this isn’t loss. It’s a reckoning.
And yet, like Philip Larkin’s “Arundel Tomb,” something does remain. Something beyond image and surface. The possibility—fragile, persistent—that what survives is not doctrine, but love.
