In Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “Christ Crowned with Thorns” Jesus, surrounded by four torturers, appears before the viewer with an air of solemn humility. Before the execution, two soldiers crown his head with a crown of thorns. Their looks are full of cold-blooded responsibility and at the same time either true or false sympathy. One even encourages Christ, placing his hand on his shoulder. He, like Judas, is even ready to kiss his victim. But the stick that the soldier holds in his left hand will very soon be needed to push the thorny thorns deeper onto the Savior’s forehead.

The collar with sharp spikes, placed on the neck of the soldier on the right, is a mystery to researchers. Such collars were placed on dogs to protect them from wolf attacks. It is also known that in Bosch’s time, a gentleman sentenced to exile on suspicion of complicity in murder walked the streets wearing a gold collar with spikes to “protect himself from the inhabitants of Ghent.” The collar here is undoubtedly a symbol that Bosch undoubtedly wanted to convey to the viewer.

Below, two Pharisees prepare Christ for the upcoming scourging: one grabs him by the clothes, the other mockingly shakes his hand in a friendly manner. On the hood of the bearded Pharisee, three signs can be seen – a star, a crescent moon and something resembling the letter “A”. Apparently, they were supposed to indicate his belonging to the Jews. The number “four” – the number of Christ’s tormentors depicted – stands out among the symbolic numbers for its particular wealth of associations; it is associated with the cross and the square.

Four parts of the world; four seasons; four rivers in Paradise; four evangelists; four great prophets – Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel; four temperaments: sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic. Many researchers believe that the four evil faces of Christ’s tormentors are the bearers of the four temperaments, that is, all types of people. The two faces at the top are considered to be the embodiment of the phlegmatic and melancholic temperament, at the bottom – the sanguine and choleric.

The dispassionate Christ is placed in the center of the composition, however, he is not the main one here, but the triumphant Evil, which has taken the form of the tormentors. Evil seems to Bosch a natural link in a certain provided order of things. If in the altar triptychs he examines the roots of evil, going back to the past of mankind, to the sin of the ancestors, then in the scene of the Passion he seeks to penetrate the essence of human nature: indifferent, cruel, thirsty for bloody spectacles, hypocritical and selfish. Before Bosch, art had never risen to such a concrete rendering of the most complex nuances of the human soul, but it also had not descended so deeply into its dark depths.