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The Crucifixion
Carlo Crivelli (Italian, about 1430–about 1495)
c. 1487
- Medium
- Tempera on panel
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 75 × 55.2 cm (29 9/16 × 21 3/4 in.); Framed: 91.4 × 72.1 × 10.2 cm (36 × 28 3/8 × 4 in.)
- Culture
- Italy
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Wirt D. Walker Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Carlo Crivelli’s vivid style married the beautiful with the grotesque. Here, the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Evangelist gaze in anguish at Jesus on the cross. Crivelli enhanced the scene’s morbidness by depicting Jesus emaciated and puffy-eyed, his mouth agape, with blood dripping from his wounds. As subtle hints toward his eventual victory over death, wind animates his loincloth and inflates the sail of a boat in the distance, while verdant plants shoot up from cracks in the rocky, arid terrain.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
