3-084-820 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

The Bad Thief to the Left of Christ; former exterior wing of the triptych: Saint John the Baptist (fragment), c1430. This imposing, cruelly exact image depicts the corpse of one of the two criminals crucified with Jesus. Executed in Tournai around 1430, it is all that remains of one of the most important retables of fifteenth-century Netherlands. The central section of the triptych, of which many copies survive, showed the Deposition. This panel formed the upper half of the inside of the right-hand wing; the outer side showed John the Baptist as a simulated sculpture.