Five hundred years ago, the epoch-making new translation of the Gospels by Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536) was published in Basel. The city’s museums celebrate the anniversary with a series of exhibitions in 2016. The Kunstmuseum’s contribution examines the image of Christ that informed the faith of Erasmus and his contemporaries and explores its transformations. Numerous rarely seen treasures from the museum’s own collections as well as works on loan unfold a complex panorama of late medieval and early modern religious sentiment. Erasmus’s call on the faithful to return to the unadulterated Christological testimony of the Gospels cannot be understood without this multifaceted visual tradition.
