Hosanna

Many Christians around the world today will be celebrating Palm Sunday, Christ’s final entry into Jerusalem and the beginning of that last journey to his death and resurrection. A week that sees Jesus welcomed as an earthly King with shouts of Hosanna before his murder with common criminals, a testament to the worst traits of the human condition, one that Antony van Dyck captures brilliantly in the crowded Palm Sunday image, dominated as it is by an overwhelming and brutal masculinity.

In 1618, Peter Paul Rubens referred to the young Anthony van Dyck as “the best of my pupils.” This painting, which may have been created as early as 1617, when the artist was only 18 years old, provides a clear demonstration of Van Dyck’s remarkably precocious talent. He was already a master of Rubens’s epic baroque style, seen in the muscular figure who stoops to cast a branch in Christ’s path. The coarse realism of this figure and his companions, together with the crowded restlessness of the composition, are hallmarks of Van Dyck’s youthful style.