The Crucifixion Diptych by Rogier van der Weyden

The Crucifixion Diptych by Rogier van der Weyden

Almost nothing but grief

Two panels. On the right, Christ hangs dead on the cross, his loincloth fluttering out on either side. On the left, Mary collapses and John the Evangelist catches her. Behind them there is no landscape, no crowd, no Jerusalem — only a grey stone wall and, hanging in front of it, two cloths of the deepest red. Van der Weyden has stripped the scene of everything but the three figures and their grief.

Why it looks modern

That radical reduction is what makes the picture feel close to twentieth-century art. The flat red fields, the grey wall and the three pale bodies almost read as abstraction. Yet it was painted around 1460, by the most admired painter in Brussels, probably for a Carthusian monastery, whose silent, contemplative monks would have wanted exactly this kind of image.

In America

The two panels were bought by the Philadelphia lawyer John G. Johnson, who left his collection to the city in 1917. They have been among the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s best-known pictures ever since.

Where it hangs

The diptych is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art; together the two panels measure 180 by 186 centimetres.

About this print

Made from a 4,421-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 29 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Philadelphia Museum of Art · Wikidata Q5189814 · Wikimedia Commons