A tightly packed crowd of about two dozen men and women surges out of a fortified stone ruin in this horizontal painting. The building fills the right half of the composition and extends off the top edge. Shrubs and vegetation grow on fragments of architecture that loom behind the crowd. Near the front of the crowd, a man wearing a lilac-purple robe kneels, bracing the crossbeam of a wooden cross over one shoulder. He wears a ring of thorns on his head, and he looks back over his shoulder so his face turns to us. His fingers are interlaced over the crossbeam, which is tied with rope. A…
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Christ Carrying the Cross

painter Cornelis van Poelenburch (Dutch, 1594/1595 - 1667)

early 1620s

Medium
oil on copper
Classification
Painting
Dimensions
overall: 44.2 x 62.3 cm (17 3/8 x 24 1/2 in.)
Culture
Dutch
Museum
National Gallery of Art, CNE-B
Credit line
The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund
Rights
Public domain (NGA Open Access, 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 National Gallery of Art

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