Stations of the Cross: Giandomenico Tiepolo, San Polo Church, Venice Italy and Art Institute, Chicago USA

Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) was the son of Giambattista Tiepolo, a master of painting.

He never achieved the status and fame of his father.

San Polo Church, Venice

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 Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Frontispiece to the set of etchings

Station I: Christ is Condemed to Death, plate one from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station I: Christ is Condemed to Death

Station II: Christ Receives the Cross, plate two from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station II: Christ Receives the Cross

Station III: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the First Time, plate three from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station III: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the First Time

Station IV: Christ Meets his Mother, plate four from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station IV: Christ Meets his Mother

Station V: Christ is Helped by Simon of Cyrene, plate five from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station V: Christ is Helped by Simon of Cyrene

Station VI: Christ's Face is Wiped by St. Veronica, plate six from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station VI: Christ’s Face is Wiped by St. Veronica

Station VII: Christ Consoles the Weeping Women, plate seven from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station VII: Christ Consoles the Weeping Women

Station IX: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the Third Time, plate nine from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station IX: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the Third Time

Painting IX: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the Third Time, San Polo Church, Venice

Station IX: Christ Falls Beneath the Cross for the Third Time

Painting IX - Detail: the crowd

The crowd is shown full of anticipation.

Station X: Christ is Stripped of His Garments, plate ten from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station X: Christ is Stripped of His Garments

Painting X: Christ is Stripped of His Garments, San Polo Church, Venice

Station X: Christ is Stripped of His Garments

Painting X - Detail

The elder

Painting X - Detail: Mother and Daughter

Mother and daughter observing

Station XI: Christ is Nailed to the Cross, plate eleven from Stations of the Cross, c. 1748, published 1749 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Station XI: Christ is Nailed to the Cross

Painting XI: Christ is Nailed to the Cross, San Polo Church, Venice

Station XI: Christ is Nailed to the Cross

Painting XI - Detail: Christ

Christ unconscious

Painting XI - Detail: Crowd

The watching crowd

Painting XII: Crucifixion, San Polo Church, Venice

Station XII: Christ crucified

Painting XIII: Deposition, San Polo Church, Venice

Station XIII: The deposition of Christ

Painting XIII - Detail

Deposition detail

Painting XIV - Entombment, San Polo Church, Venice

Station XIV: Entombment

Crucifixion II

I continue today with the second part of the Crucifixion paintings, from the 19th  to the 20th century.

Paul Gauguin

Yellow Christ (1889)

Paul Gauguin

Albright-Know Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, USA

Emil Nolde

Crucifixion (1912) 

Emil Nolde

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)

Georges Rouault

Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Pablo Picasso

Crucifixion (1930)

Pablo Picasso

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)

Marc Chagall

Art Institute of Chicago

Francis Bacon 

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion  circa 1944

Francis Bacon - Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion

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)

Francis Bacon - Fragment of a Crucifixion

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)

Salvador Dali

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)

Salvador Dali

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)

Antonio Saura

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”.

Source: Guggenheim Museum’s website

 

 

Crucifixion I

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)

Cimabue Crucifixion

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)

Giotto Crucifixion

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)

van der Weyden - Triptych

“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)

van der Weyden - Diptych

“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

 

Grunewald Crucifixion

“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)

El Greco Crucifixion

“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)

Goya Crucifixion

“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.

The Isenheim Altarpiece by Grunewald: Crucifixion

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.

The Crucifixion

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.

The face

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.

The Hand

and the nailed feet dripping blood… forming a solid river of pain

The Feet

Mary and John

Mary’s white garment and pale face contrast with the dark background.

hands

Mary Magdalene

John the Baptist

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.