Depictions of Western Christianity in the Middle Ages, e.g. the Egbert Codex and the Codex Aureus Epternacensis, seem to depict the ecce homo scene, but more often than not only show the Crowning of thorns and the Mocking of Christ, which precede the actual ecce homo scene in the Bible. The independent image only developed around 1400, probably in Burgundy, but then rapidly became extremely popular, especially in Northern Europe. , c. 1491–1520. Aelbrecht Bouts The motif found increasing currency as the Passion became a central theme in Western piety in the 15th and 16th centuries. The ecce homo theme was included not only in the passion plays of medieval theatre, but also in cycles of illustrations of the story of the Passion, as in the Great Passion of Albrecht Dürer or the ' of Martin Schongauer. The scene was often depicted as a sculpture or group of sculptures; even altarpieces and other paintings with the motif were produced. 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. Equally, this style of art has been read as a kind of simplistic externalisation of the inner hatred of the angry crowd towards Jesus, not necessarily implying any racial judgment. 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. At the same time similar motifs of the Man of Sorrow and Christ at rest increased in importance. The subject was used repeatedly in later so-called old master prints, in the paintings of the Renaissance and the Baroque, as well as in Baroque sculptures. Hieronymus Bosch painted his first Ecce Homo during the 1470s. 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. In 1498, Albrecht Dürer depicted the suffering of Christ in the Ecce Homo of his Great Passion in unusually close relation with his self-portrait, leading to a reinterpretation of the motif as a metaphor for the suffering of the artist. James Ensor used the ecce homo motif in his ironic painting Christ and the Critics, in which he portrayed himself as Christ. 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. The crowd forms a distant mass, almost without individuality, and much of the detailed focus is on the normally secondary figures of Pilate's aides, guards, secretary and wife. 1896. One of the more famous modern versions of the Ecce Homo motif was that by the Polish artist Adam Chmielowski, who went on to found, as Brother Albert, the Albertine Brothers and, a year later, the Albertine Sisters, eventually becoming proclaimed a saint on 12 November 1989 by Pope John Paul II, the author of ', a play about Chmielowski, written between 1944–1950, when the future Pontiff and later himself a saint was a young priest. , was significant in Chmielowski's life, as it is in Act 1 of Wojtyła's play. Pope John Paul II is said to have kept a copy of this painting in his apartment at the Vatican. The original can be viewed in the Ecce Homo Sanctuary of the Albertine Sisters in Kraków. It was painted at a time when the painter was going through an inner struggle, trying to decide whether to remain an artist, or to give up painting to pursue the calling to minister to the poor. Especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, the meaning of ecce homo motif has been extended to the portrayal of suffering and the degradation of humans through violence and war. Notable 20th-century depictions are George Grosz's and Lovis Corinth's Ecce Homo. The 84 drawings and 16 watercolors of Grosz criticize the socio-political conditions of the Weimar Republic. Corinth shows, from the perspective of the crowd, Jesus, a soldier, and Pilate dressed as a physician. Following the Holocaust of World War II, Otto Dix portrayed himself, in Ecce Homo with self-likeness behind barbed wire'', as the suffering Christ in a concentration camp.
