Agony in the Garden

The Garden Prayer (Italian: Orazione nell'orto) is a panel painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli.

It measures 53 cm high and 35 cm wide. It was painted between 1498 and 1500 and is currently preserved in the Museum of the Royal Chapel of Granada (Spain). It belongs to the artistic ensemble that Queen Isabella the Catholic contributed to the decoration of the temple.

Savonarola's preaching strongly influenced Botticelli and led him to abandon, in the latter part of his life, allegorical and profane representations to devote himself only to sacred paintings, of which this is an example. In his later works, Botticelli rejects complex compositions, returning to simple models of devotional paintings. Although the composition is simple, Botticelli does not stop paying attention to some details of the landscape, such as the palisade. Jesus Christ is praying, a central figure who is represented larger than the rest because he is the most important. The three apostles asleep in the foreground are also of great simplicity, without reflecting anatomical complexities of earlier times. The refined, harmonious, sometimes idyllic painting and always of unquestionable poetics that personalized the Botticelli characterizes the table in general. A skillful hierarchical staggering of the composition, supported by the arrangement of the landscape, allows the artist the desired location of the protagonists of the story. The unrenounceable virtuosity of the drawing, the quality and texture of the chromatic ranges or the absolute harmony that is the soul of the simple and luminous country, are identified with the artistic ways of the painter of Lorenzo de Medici.

Iconographically the moment reflected is dramatic, the one in which Christ was comforted in his pain by an angel. As a last note, it should be said that in the impossible positions that try in the lower section of the work the spatial insertion of the apostles, influence and relationship can be linked with the investigations and perspectivistic concerns of Andrea Mantegna (1431-1503), it is enough to remember his thematic versions of the predella of the Altarpiece of San Zenón of Verona (Museum of Fine Arts of Tours, (1457-59) or that of the National Gallery in London (1455).