Christ’s Passion is the pivotal event for Christians all over the world. This is the reason that it has been the subject of so many works of art. Today I present the relevant works of art from the collection of one of the great small museums of the world, the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Spain.
Important note: All the pictures (except one) are from the archives of the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum and are presented here for non-commercial purposes. All readers of this post are kindly requested to respect this condition of use.
The earliest and first work in this review is “The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John and Angels”, by the Sienese artist Ugolino di Nerio, or Ugolino da Siena. The panel was part of an altarpiece in a church in Florence, Italy.
Tempera and gold on panel. 135 x 89 cm.
The composition is minimal, illuminated by the golden background, which gives to the painting a metaphysical dimension. The Virgin and St John turn their faces to the right of the picture, counterbalancing Jesus’s face which turns to the left. I particularly like the angels as they fly around the cross.
Descent from the Cross, Anonymous German (Middle Rhine), c. 1420.
Oil on panel. 62 x 30 cm
In stark contrast to the Crucifixion of Ugolino di Nerio, “The descent from the Cross” of the anonymous German painter is characterized by a complex composition and a realism that cannot be escaped. Notice that there is no scenery in the background.
The Crucifixion, Anonymous Valencian Artist, c. 1450-146
Oil on panel. 44.8 x 34 cm
Although the palette of the painting is austere, earthy and on the dark side, this is a painting with complex composition and expression of emotions. I cannot help but adore the landscape in the background, a clear reference to the Northern European school of painting.
The Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John the Baptist, Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Francis,
Paolo Uccello, c. 1460-1465
Tempera on panel. 45 x 67 cm
Back to the minimalism of tempera. What shines in the otherwise grim composition is the golden Cross and the garments of the Virgin and St John. The horizontal (2 figures on the left, two on the right of the Cross) and vertical (dark sky at the top, dark ground at the bottom) symmetry is the highlight of the composition.
The Crucifixion, Gerard David, c.147
Oil on panel. 88 x 56 cm
The Flemish painter Gerard David here shows the clear influence of Rogier van der Weyden among others. The palette of the bluish colors in the landscape announce the arrival of Patinir.
Lamentation Triptych, Master of the Legend of Saint Lucy, c. 1475
Oil on panel. Central panel: 75 x 61 cm; lateral wings: 75 x 27 cm
A Crucifixion triptych from the North, with the characteristic color palette, and the bluish landscape. The influence of Rogier van der Weyden and his period is clear.
The Risen Christ, Bramantino, c. 1490
Mixed media on panel. 109 x 73 cm
The risen Christ is a rare subject, and here we have one painting of it. But this is not a happy Christ, there is no triumph, no joy, here we have a tormented Christ who is still feeling the horror of crucifixion, and the background is a ruined building of the classical period. The full moon is up in the sky, but the light is minimal. This is a dark, sad, painting. One of my favorites!
Christ with the Cross, El Greco, c.1587-1596
Oil on canvas. 66 x 52.5 cm
El Greco here gives us a picture of the face of Christ, before the Crucifixion, at the height of His torment. It is a stunning painting, because the painter accomplishes so much with so little. Literally minimal, only the red garment appears on the canvas.
Christ on the Cross, Zurbaran, c. 1630
Oil on canvas. 214 x 143.5 cm
This is a picture that reminds me of a similar painting by Velazquez (in the Prado) and another one by Goya (also in Prado). It must have been popular and this is the reason there are so many around.
La Pietà, Jose de Ribera, c. 1633
Oil on canvas. 157 x 210 cm
Wonderful, dark, strong, minimal painting.
Christ on the Cross, Anthony van Dyck, c.1627
Oil on panel. 105.3 x 73 cm
Compare this painting to the Crucifixion by Zurbaran. This is dynamic, almost live, you can feel the torment and the escaping life out of Christ’s body. Wonderful.
Christ on the Cross, Anthony van Dyck, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
This is a black and white chalk drawing in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, apparently done before the painting in the Thyssen.
Here our little journey in the Thyssen collection ends. I hope that you have found at least one picture that you liked. Happy Easter!
I was introduced to the work of Renato Guttuso back in 1996, when Whitechapel Gallery in London exhibited some of his paintings.
Today I pay tribute to the great realist painter, whose vibrant colors remind me of the Mediterranean, the Sea, the Countryside, the smells and the tastes.
Crucifixion was the painting that led the Vatican to declare that Guttoso was a pictor diabolicus, a devilish painter.
The naked Mary Magdalen leans on the crucified Jesus.
Only the Holy Mother is dressed in her blue gown.
The Roman guards are riding their horses naked.
The influence of cubism is felt all over the landscape and the almost sculptural bodies.
The “Landscape with lovers” is another type of landscape. Guttuso here is almost poetical. And I like this more than the loaded and symbolic and rebellious “Crucifixion”.
The market of Vucciria in Palermo is one of the most colorful places on this Earth. Guttuso painted it in a glorious way.
“The Vucciria market, Guttuso said, was one of his first discoveries when he moved to Palermo as a student in the early 1930s. “When I began to paint, among my first subjects were those colors, those planes of light.” But his great painting of the market was not done until 1974, when he was living in Varese, Lombardy, “under the pallid light of the north.” He said the picture was “a great still life” imbued with all the noise, the energy and the violence of “the markets of poor countries.” In order to paint from life, Guttuso had an agent ship him the eggs, the cardoons, the tuna, by air from Palermo to Milan. He then persuaded a local butcher to loan him a side of beef “for no more than two hours” so he could sketch it into the composition. The minutes ticked by, and then the hours. The butcher was counting how long his beef would survive without refrigeration. Guttuso, meanwhile, was molding those ribs and haunches into his most powerful memento mori.” (1)
The curves of a Sicilian woman blend with the cuts of swordfish.
The beef carcass demands respect, next to the feeble rabbit.
Cheese and cured meets are plentiful.
This is why I consider Guttoso primarily a painter of the Senses. Looking into these details one cannot help but sense with her whole existence the magnificence of the goods of the market and the pleasure of being alive.
You smell the rose, you sense the presence of Mimise, even though she is looking down. The sensual overflows and overpowers everything else. Guttuso does this almost magical transformation by using colors as he has perceived them since he was born in 1912 in in Bagheria, near Palermo (Sicily).
Guttuso was a communist, and a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).
He was aware of the impact of technology on everyday life, and he painted it in his own unique way.
In 1946 with Birolli, Vedova, Morlotti, Turcato and others formed the group Fronte Nuovo delle Arti. Made frequent visits to Paris to study modern French art and for a time was influenced by Picasso. Many of his works have been inspired by the poverty and struggles of the Sicilian peasantry. His later works also include large paintings of the student riots in Paris in May 1968, the funeral of the Italian Communist leader Togliatti. (2)
I close this short tribute with another landscape painting. Santa Panagia, in Sicily. “Viale Santa Panagia is a street which runs through the ancient Greek quarters of Tyche and Akradina in Siracusa, a Sicilian city that Guttuso was fond of and visited frequently in the 1950s.” (Tate Gallery).
After Grunewald’s Crucifixion, come the depictions by Francis Bacon.
A self-professed atheist, he has painted over and over again the subject of Crucifixion, two of which I have already presented in Crucifixion II.
Today I extracted from his “Sylvester Interviews” (1) material relevant to the Crucifixion and present it dressed with relevant pictures.
Interview 2
David Sylvester (DS): Is it a part of your intention to try and create a tragic art?
Francis Bacon (FB): No. Of course, I think that, if one could find a valid myth today where there was the distance between grandeur and its fall of the tragedies of Aeschylus and Shakespeare, it would be tremendously helpful. But, when you’re outside a tradition, as every artist is today, one can only want to record one’s own feelings about certain situations as closely to one’s nervous system as one possibly can.
DS: There is of course, one great traditional mythological and tragic subject you’ve painted very often, which is the Crucifixion.
FB: Well, there have been so very many great pictures in European art of the Crucifixion that it’s a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation. You may say it’s a curious thing for a non-religious person to take the Crucifixion, but I don’t think that that has anything to do with it. The great Crucifixions that one knows of – one doesn’t know whether they were painted by men who had religious beliefs.
DS: But they were painted as part of Christian culture and they were made for believers.
FB: Yes, that is true. It may be unsatisfactory, but I haven’t found another subject so far that has been as helpful for covering certain areas of human feelings and behavior. Perhaps it is only because so many people have worked on this particular theme that it has created this armature – I can’t think of a better way of saying it – on which one can operate all types of level of feeling.
DS: Of course, a lot of modern artists in all the media faced with this problem have gone back to the Greek myths. You yourself, in the Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, didn’t paint the traditional Christian figures at the foot of the Cross, but the Eumenides. Are there other themes from Greek mythology that you’ve ever thought of using?
FB: Well, I think Greek mythology is even further from us than Christianity. One of the things about the Crucifixion is the very fact that the central figure of Christ is raised into a very pronounced and isolated position, which gives it from a formal point of view, greater possibilities than having all the different figures placed on the same level. The alteration of level is, from my point of view, very important.
DS: In painting a Crucifixion, do you find you approach the problem in a radically different way from when working on other paintings?
FB: Well, of course, you’re working then about your own feelings and sensations, really. You might say it’s almost nearer to a self-portrait. You are working on all sorts of very private feelings about behavior and about the way life is.
DS: One very personal recurrent configuration in your work is the interlocking of Crucifixion imagery with that of the butcher’s shop. The connection with meat must mean a great deal to you.
FB: Well, it does. If you go to some of those great stores, where you just go through those great halls of death, you can see0 fish and meat and birds and everything else all lying dead there. And, of course, one has got to remember that there is this great beauty of the color of meat.
DS: The conjunction of the meat with the Crucifixion seems to happen in two ways – through the presence on the scene of sides of meat and through the transformation of the crucified figure itself into a hanging carcass of meat.
FB: Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go into a butcher’s shop I always think it’s surprising that I wasn’t there instead of the animal. But using the meat in that particular way is possibly like the way one might use the spine, because we are constantly seeing images of the human body through X-ray photographs and that obviously does alter the ways by which one can use the body.
Postscript 1
Bacon had spoken of how people come away from the Grünewald Isenheim altarpiece ‘as though purged into happiness, into a fuller reality of existence.’ Whether this was true for him too as he faced the last months of his life, we may never know. In the last triptych he painted in 1991, he steps off the earth into the darkness of one of his black rectangles, looking out from a reflective, haunted self-portrait. ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be eighty and alone at midnight,’ he said to his godson Francis Wishart. But it cannot be insignificant that, knowing he was critically ill, he chose to be admitted to a Catholic convent where he died with a crucifix hanging on the wall behind his bed. He was cremated to taped Gregorian chant, in a coffin with a metal cross on the lid. (2)
Postscript 2: Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion c. 1944
When this triptych was first exhibited at the end of the war in 1945, it secured Bacon’s reputation. The title relates these horrific beasts to the saints traditionally portrayed at the foot of the cross in religious painting. Bacon even suggested he had intended to paint a larger crucifixion beneath which these would appear. He later related these figures to the Eumenides – the vengeful furies of Greek myth, associating them within a broader mythological tradition. Typically, Bacon drew on a range of sources for these figures, including a photograph purporting to show the materialisation of ectoplasm and the work of Pablo Picasso. (4)
Second Version 1988
Part man, part beast, these howling creatures first appeared in Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which Bacon painted during the Second World War. One critic described that picture as a reflection of ‘the atrocious world into which we have survived’. Bacon identified his distorted figures with the vengeful Greek Furies, while the title places them in the Christian context of the crucifixion. In this version, painted in 1988, Bacon changed the background colour from orange to blood red, and placed more space around the figures, plunging them into a deep void.
Postscript 3: Bacon’s Final Triptych, 1991
In Bacon’s final triptych, made at the end of his career, a composite figure steps in and out of stagelike spaces. Seemingly nailed to the canvas are closely cropped headshots of Bacon’s face, at right, and, at left, that of a Brazilian racecar driver, placed above muscular lower bodies. The triptych form is rooted in Christian religious painting; the center panel is traditionally reserved for the object of devotion. Here, an abject mass of flesh spills forth from the black niche. Bacon said his triptychs were “the thing I like doing most, and I think this may be related to the thought I’ve sometimes had of making a film. I like the juxtaposition of the images separated on three different canvases.” (3)
Postscript 4
For me the Crucifixion is the agony and ecstasy of life. I do not have much time for Resurrection. This is like the good ending of a Hollywood film. It is not the miracle that I do not buy in. It is the modern day interpretation that, after all, there is a good ending in life, that there is life after death.
Sources
(1) David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon, Thames and Hudson
Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) was the son of Giambattista Tiepolo, a master of painting.
He never achieved the status and fame of his father.
However, between 1747 and 1749 he painted “Via Crucis”, the stations of the Cross, in the Oratory of the Crucifixion in the Venetian Church of San Polo. In the same period he also etched the sequence of prints with the same title.
This sequence of 14 paintings is for me the most moving sequence of Christ’s path to the Cross and the Beyond.
Inside the San Polo Church (when I visited) there were on display only some of the 14 paintings, the ones I photographed and have included here.
To my delight, I discovered some of the etchings on paper at the Art Institute of Chicago, which I also display here. Although they do not form a complete series, they supplement the paintings very nicely.
I followed the numerical sequence for both the prints and the paintings.
Frontispiece to the set of etchings
Station I: Christ is Condemed to Death
Station II: Christ Receives the Cross
Station III: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the First Time
Station IV: Christ Meets his Mother
Station V: Christ is Helped by Simon of Cyrene
Station VI: Christ’s Face is Wiped by St. Veronica
Station VII: Christ Consoles the Weeping Women
Station IX: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the Third Time
Station IX: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the Third Time
I continue today with the second part of the Crucifixion paintings, from the 19th to the 20th century.
Paul Gauguin
Yellow Christ (1889)
Albright-Know Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA
Emil Nolde
Crucifixion (1912)
Nolde Stifftung, Seebull
On February 20, 1912, the painter Emil Nolde wrote to his friend and patron Karl Osthaus, director of the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, concerning an upcoming exhibition there, and announced a major new work:
In the last year I have created a piece consisting of nine biblical pictures that belong together.I finished it during the last few weeks. I thought that I would also send this to you forexhibition. The size of the entire piece: 240cm high, 630cm wide.
On February 28, 1912, he wrote to his long-time friend Hans Fehr about the piece, enclosing a thumbnail sketch of it that shows a large central picture of a crucifixion flanked on either side byfour paintings. Nolde identified the subjects of the eight smaller canvases in writing on thesketch: Holy Night and The Twelve-Year-Old Christ (left above), The Three Magi and TheBetrayal of Christ (left below), Women at the Tomb and Ascension (right above), Resurrectionand Doubting Thomas (right below).2 All nine canvases of this work, known collectively as TheLife of Christ, remain together today in the galleries of the Nolde Foundation, near Seebüll,Germany.
Nolde no doubt recognized that the monumental scheme of The Life of Christ–far larger than any previous work–almost literally hinged on Crucifixion.7 For it he incorporated a symmetrical severity and a solidity of construction well beyond any earlier picture. The three crosses establish the central axis, outer boundaries, and upper edge of the composition. Nolde pushed the figures almost into a single plane very close to the picture’s surface. He reinforced the iconic effect that results with certain aspects of his primitivizing style, mainly angular forms, flat colors, and unworked surfaces….
Of the individual canvases for The Life of Christ, Crucifixion contains the most obvious traces of an interest in Northern Medieval art. Crucifixions from this period frequently include several motifs—all incorporated by Nolde. First, the tortured flesh of Christ, in the form of an emaciated body, prominent wounds, and streams of blood. Grünewald’s Crucifixion from the Isenheim Altarpiece is the best known and most extreme example of this type. Second, the followers traditionally stand to the left of the cross and display intense emotions through gesture and physiognomy, often with the Magdalene on her knees and grasping the base of the cross and the Virgin collapsing into the arms of St. John. Third, many contrast the followers on the left with an equally distinct group of executioners and mockers to the right. Nolde even imitated a convention of some Medieval art by enlarging the body of Christ for prominence.
Source: William B. Sieger, Literary Texts and Formal Strategies in Emil Nolde’s Religious Paintings
Georges Roualt
Crucifixion (early 1920s)
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Pablo Picasso
Crucifixion (1930)
Musee Picasso, Paris, France
Picasso in addition to the painting (oil on wood) prepared more than ten drawings with ink as “studies” on crucifixion. The Isenheim Altarpiece of Grunewald gave him inspiration and challenge.
Marc Chagall
White Crucifixion (1938)
Art Institute of Chicago
Francis Bacon
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion circa 1944
Tate Gallery, London, UK
When this triptych was first exhibited at the end of the war in 1945, it secured Bacon’s reputation. The title relates these horrific beasts to the saints traditionally portrayed at the foot of the cross in religious painting. Bacon even suggested he had intended to paint a larger crucifixion beneath which these would appear.He later related these figures to the Eumenides – the vengeful furies of Greek myth, associating them within a broader mythological tradition. Typically, Bacon drew on a range of sources for these figures, including a photograph purporting to show the materialisation of ectoplasm and the work of Pablo Picasso.
Source: Tate Gallery’s website
Fragment of a Crucifixion (1950)
Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Major artists create myths around themselves or have the ability to motivate others to do it for them. The way Francis Bacon’s work has been received is coloured by this. The view that at certain moments the person and the work sometime coincide gained increasing emphasis in Bacon’s career, culminating with the feature fi lm Love is the Devil (1998) by John Maybury. There is hardly any other artist whose world is so much a part of his work, and spicy details about his life are happily quoted by biographers and reviewers. Bacon himself refused to go into the interpretation of his paintings and after 1962 even forbid any interpretive comment in catalogues. His argument was that there was not anything to explain. Fragment of a Crucifi xion and the response to Bacon’s work give cause to think about interpretation, biography and autonomy. Do the paintings exemplify a state of mind, or can they be related to views about identity and the male body? Do they represent a post-war view on the world, in which the automation of human interaction can be heard, or do the themes deprive us of an insight into a painter ‘easy on himself’?
Source: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Salvador Dali
Christ of Saint John of the Cross: Nuclear Mysticism (1951)
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow
“The title of the painting was said to have been inspired by a drawing made by a Spanish Carmelite friar who was canonised as St John of The Cross in the 16th Century.
It was made after the saint had a vision in which he saw the crucifixion from above.
Dali painted his crucifixion scene set above the rocky harbour of his home village of Port Lligat in Spain. “
Source: BBC
Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) (1954)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
Dali commented on his painting:
“Metaphysical, transcendent cubism, it is based entirely on the Treatise on Cubic Form by Juan de Herrera, Philip the 2nd’s architect, builder of the Escorial Palace: it is a treatise inspired by Ars Magna of the Catalonian philosopher and alchemist Raymond Lulle. The cross is formed by an octahedral hypercube. The number nine is identifiable and becomes especially consubstantial with the body of Christ. The extremely noble figure of Gala is the perfect union of the develpment of the hypercubic octahedron on the human level of the cube. She is depicted in front of the Bay of Port Lligat. The most noble beings were painted by Velazques and Zurbaran; I only approach nobility while painting Gala, and noblity can only be insired by the human being.”
Antonio Saura
Crucifixion (1959)
Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Euskaleria
“Ever since I was a boy I have been obsessed with Velázquez’ Christ in the Prado in Madrid, with his face darkened by the black hair of a Flamenco dancer, with his bullfighter’s feet, with the stillness of a flesh and bone puppet transformed into Adonis. I can even see myself immersed in the hazy museum, holding my father’s hand and looking at the terrible pacific cross, which I remember as something immense”.
The constant presence of the Crucifixion between 1956 and 1996 doesn’t respond to religious belief. It is, in the artist’s own words, a way of looking at the “timeless presence of suffering”.
“Contrary to Velázquez’ Christ, in these works I thought that by giving the image a feeling of tension and protest it was possible to capture a trace of almost blasphemous humour, but there is something else. In the image of the Crucified Christ, I may have reflected my situation of man alone in a threatening universe at which it is possible to shout, although, seen from another angle, I am also interested in the tragedy of a man “not that of a god” absurdly nailed to a cross. An image which can still serve as the tragic symbol of our era”.
As Easter approaches, I want to share with you some of my favourite depictions of the drama of Christ. I will do it in two parts. In the first part I will present paintings from the 13th to the 18th century. In the second part I will present paintings after the 19th century. In all paintings, except Cimabue and Giotto, I have inserted comments made by the museums where they are kept. In some instances, I have added also my comments in italics.
Cimabue
Crucifixion (1274)
Church of Santa Croce, Firenze
In the same church where Michelangelo is burried, you can find this masterpiece of the mentor of Giotto. The figure of Christ on the Cross has influenced Francis Bacon when he created his own Crucifixion triptych (it will be shown in Part II). It is a very intense picture. The simplicity of the palette brings out the severity of the subject.
Giotto
Crucifixion (circa 1305)
Scrovegni Chapel, Padova
In stark contrast to Cimabue’s intense but minimal composition, this is a busy crucifixion, with a lot of people and angels around. The lack of intensity is its major drawback, although Giotto’s mastery of colours and composition is evident.
Rogier van der Weyden
The Crucifixion Triptych (circa 1440)
“The scene presented today as the wing of an altarpiece probably originates from a single panel on which the frame was only painted. At an early stage the work was sawn into three pieces so that the depictions of Mary Magdalene and St. Veronica became side-wings of a triptych. The great artistic innovation of van der Weyden may therefore have carried even greater weight in the original version: for the first time he combines all the participants – the crucifixion group, saints and benefactors – in front of a unified landscape in which the idealised view of Jerusalem appears on the horizon.”
Source: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The Crucifixion, with the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist Mourning (circa 1460)
“The greatest old master painting in the Museum, Rogier van der Weyden’s diptych presents the Crucifixion as a timeless dramatic narrative. To convey overwhelming depths of human emotion, Rogier located monumental forms in a shallow, austere, nocturnal space accented only by brilliant red hangings. He focused on the experience of the Virgin, her unbearable grief expressed by her swooning into the arms of John the Evangelist. The intensity of her anguish is echoed in the agitated, fluttering loincloth that moves around Christ’s motionless body as if the air itself were astir with sorrow. Rogier’s use of two panels in a diptych, rather than the more usual three found in a triptych, is rare in paintings of this period, and allowed the artist to balance the human despair at the darkest hour of the Christian faith against the promise of redemption.”
Katherine Crawford Luber, fromPhiladelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 167.
Grunewald
The Small Crucifixion, c. 1511/1520
“Matthias Grünewald’s Small Crucifixion is a masterful example of that artist’s ability to translate his deep spiritual faith into pictorial form. Each individual, according to Grünewald, must reexperience within himself not only the boundless joy of Christ’s triumphs but also the searing pains of his Crucifixion.
In order to communicate this mystical belief, Grünewald resorted to a mixture of ghastly realism and coloristic expressiveness. Silhouetted against a greenish-blue sky and illuminated by an undefined light source, Christ’s haggard and emaciated frame sags limply on the cross. The details — the twisted and gnarled feet and hands, the crown of thorns, the agonized look upon Jesus’ face, and the ragged loincloth — bear strident witness to physical suffering and emotional torment. This abject mood is intensified by the anguished expressions and demonstrative gestures of John the Evangelist, the Virgin Mary, and the kneeling Mary Magdalene.
Grünewald’s dissonant, eerie colors were also rooted in biblical fact. The murky sky, for instance, corresponds to Saint Luke’s description of “a darkness over all the earth.” Grünewald, who himself witnessed a full eclipse in 1502, has recreated here the dark and rich tonalities associated with such natural phenomena.
Today, only twenty paintings by Grünewald are extant, and The Small Crucifixion is the only one of them in America.”
Source: National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
El Greco
Crucifixion (1600)
“A night view of Calvary with a markedly Eucharistic character. Mary Magdalene, at Christ’s feet, and three angels collecting the blood of the slain Savior, appear framed by the figures of the Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist.
Light and color are used to bring dramatic intensity to the chosen subject, generating a night scene with highly contrasted colors. Some figures, such as that of Mary Magdalene, follow Italian models, recalling the artist’s training.
Along with other paintings in the Prado Museum, this was probably painted for the attic of the altarpiece in the church of the Augustine College of María de Aragón in Madrid.”
Source: Museo National del Prado
Goya
Crucifixion (1780)
“Christ is depicted on the Cross, over a black background, with four nails and a foot platform, in keeping with the tradition of seventeenth-century Spanish painting. Nevertheless, the classic concept of beauty brought to Spain by Mengs and Bayeu is also perceptible. And Goya softens the bloodiest and most dramatic aspects of this subject, bringing out the beauty of the nude body.
Goya presented this work at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in May, 1780, gaining the rank of Academician of Merit with it. The canvas was sent to the church of San Francisco el Grande, whose decoration was sponsored by the King, himself. Thus, the Academy recognized the technical qualities of this painting, as well as the orthodoxy of its image.”
Source: Museo National del Prado
As the first part is closing, it is interesting to note that in this painting it is as if Goya is shaking hands with Cimabue.
Today I want to present some pictures from the Isenheim Altarpiece, by the German painter Mathis Grunewald, which I consider to be one of the true Masterpieces of art in the world. I was introduced to the Altarpiece by Anne Tennant, during a lecture she gave before the opening of Hindemith’s opera “Mathis der Maler” in the Royal Opera House of London.
Isenheim is a small town near Colmar, in Alsace. The Altarpiece was commissioned by Saint Anthony’s Monastery, which was a hospital” treating “St Anthony’s fire”, a sickness modern science now knows as ergotism, caused by eating rye bread infected by a parasitic fungus. The horrific appearance of Christ’s flesh on the altarpiece is not pure fantasy, but portrays symptoms the monks were trying to alleviate.” (remark by Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, 12 December 2007)
The Altarpiece was painted from 1513 to 1515.
Although Isenheim and Colmar are today in France, in the early 16th century they were decidedly German, and in a way the Isenheim Altarpiece is Germany’s Sistine Chapel.
Today the Altarpiece is in the Unterlinden Museum of Colmar. It was moved to Colmar after the French Revolution.
The four panels that comprise it are:
Crucifixion
Nativity and the Party of Angels
The Temptation of Saint Anthony, and Saint Anthony visiting Saint Paul the Hermite
Announciation and Resurrection
This post will focus on the Crucifixion, which is one of the most powerful and moving depiction of human drama and suffering I have seen.
On the left Mary in white is supported by John the Evangelist, while Mary Magdalene (a much smaller figure) is on her knees parying. On the right John the Baptist is pointing at a scripture. There is no respect for analogies in this painting. There is no respect for pespective. Darkness, pain, suffering, the almost absolute cenrtainty of death dominate the picture.
Christ is dying an agonizing, slow, horrifying death. He is bloody, discolored, punctured all over, horrific marks covering his body.
Christ is dying and there is not redeeming feature in the painting for this horrible death! Although there are figures surrounding the cross, Christ is alone, in this empty terrain where death is the only certainty.
The twisted fingers have inspired many artists to depict the agony of death.
and the nailed feet dripping blood… forming a solid river of pain
Mary’s white garment and pale face contrast with the dark background.
Gospel of St John iii. 30: ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’
In the next post I will present the Resurrection panel of the alterpiece.