Ecce homo

But, from the 15th century in the West, and much earlier in the art of the Eastern church, devotional pictures began to portray Jesus alone, in half or full figure with a purple robe, loincloth, crown of thorns and torture wounds, especially on his head, and later became referred to as images of the Ecce homo.

Narrative scenes of the biblical moment are almost never shown in Eastern art, but icons of the single figure of the tortured Christ go back over a millennium, and have sometimes been called Ecce homo images by later sources.

[g] Eastern Orthodox tradition generally refers to this type of icon by a different title:[h] ″Jesus Christ the Bridegroom″ (Byzantine Greek: Ιηϲοῦϲ Χριστόϲ ὁ Νυμφίος, romanized: Iesoũs Christós ho Nymphíos).

[i] It derives from the words in New Testament Greek: "ἰδοὺ ὁ νυμφίος", romanized: "idoù ho nymphíos", by which Jesus Christ reveals himself, in his Parable of the Ten Virgins according to the Gospel of Matthew,[a] as the bearer of the most high joy.

[k] On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, the first three days of Passion Week, the last week before Pascha, consecrated to the commemoration of the last days of the earthly life of the Saviour, the troparion is chanted: "Behold the Bridegroom Cometh at Midnight" (Byzantine Greek: Ἰδού ὁ Νυμφίος ἔρχεται ἐν τῷ μέσῳ τῆς νυκτός, romanized: idoú ho nymphíos érchetai en tõ méso tẽs nuktós).

Like the passion plays, the visual depictions of the ecce homo scene, it has been argued, often, and increasingly, portray the people of Jerusalem in a highly critical light, bordering perhaps on antisemitic caricatures.

The motif of the lone figure of a suffering Christ who seems to be staring directly at the observer, enabling him/her to personally identify with the events of the Passion, arose in the late Middle Ages.

[20] He returned to the subject in 1490 to paint in a characteristically Netherlandish style, with deep perspective and a surreal ghostly image of praying monks in the lower left-hand corner.

Antonio Ciseri's 1871 Ecce Homo portrayal presents a semi-photographic view of a balcony seen from behind the central figures of a scourged Christ and Pilate (whose face is not visible).

Following the Holocaust of World War II, Otto Dix portrayed himself, in Ecce Homo with self-likeness behind barbed wire (1948), as the suffering Christ in a concentration camp.