Jesus Mocked by Soldiers by Édouard Manet

Throughout his career, Édouard Manet managed to shock and confound the public with his bold technique and unorthodox approach to subject matter. The most startling feature of his great religious composition Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers is that it was painted at all. After the advent of the Realist movement in earlier nineteenth-century French painting, grounded in the here and now, avant-garde artists in France did not pursue religious themes. Yet, while Manet was most certainly a painter of secular subjects—indeed, he was particularly urbane in his themes and lifestyle—he was also interested in the biblical narratives that had compelled artists for many centuries. It is likely that there was a connection between this interest and the popular 1863 biography Vie de Jésus (Life of Jesus) by the French philosopher and historian Joseph-Ernest Renan, a controversial work that emphasizes Christ’s humanity.