Crucified Man
Melchior Lorck (Danish, 1526/27–after 1588)
after Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564)
1550
- Medium
- engraving
- Classification
- Culture
- Germany
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Prints
- Credit line
- Gift of Leonard C. Hanna Jr.
- 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 Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
In this print Danish artist Melchior Lorck isolated the figure of the Old Testament villain Haman from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling. Lorck may have seen it in person, or in a print or drawing. He rendered the musculature and outline carefully, but less successful were his grasp of the figure’s foreshortening (the rendering of a figure in perspective), and the proportions of the body in relation to the head. Artists working outside Italy around 1550 still did not generally sketch from live models, nor did they directly study anatomy, which may explain Lorck’s awkward reconciliation of the form.
