Through most of its history, a crucifixion was not painted for a museum. It was made for one place, an altar, a convent or a hospital chapel, and for the people who prayed there. Floods and wars later tore several of them from that place, and the journeys that followed are part of their story.
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What the Cross Asked of Painters
A crucifixion painting shows the death of Jesus on the cross, as the Gospels tell it. The texts name the women who stood near the cross and the soldiers who shared out his clothes, but they say almost nothing about what the scene looked like.
That silence left every painter with choices to make. He had to settle on three nails or four, on a lone figure or a whole crowd, and he had to think about where the picture would hang, because many crucifixions were made to be seen from far below, high above an altar or a church screen.
Each painting chosen shows the cross itself or the people gathered at its foot, between the 1280s and the 1950s.
12. Cimabue, Crucifix of Santa Croce (before 1288)
Large patches of bare wood show through Christ's body on the Crucifix of Santa Croce, in Florence. Time did not wear them away. They all date from a single day, November 4, 1966.
The cross is far older than that day. Cimabue painted it before 1288 for Santa Croce, the great Franciscan church of the city. It stands more than four meters high, and it was probably made to rise above the screen that divided the church, facing the congregation.
For the figure, Cimabue followed a Byzantine model known as the Christus patiens, the suffering Christ, with the body bent to one side and the head bowed. What he added was weight. He modeled the body with light and shade so that it seems to hang from the cross, which the Byzantine images he started from did not do.
Seven centuries later, the cross no longer stood in the church. In 1900 it had moved into the museum set up in the old refectory of the convent, the hall where the friars once took their meals. It was hanging there when the Arno burst its banks in 1966. When volunteers reached the hall two days later, the water inside had risen to about 3.4 meters, or 11 feet.
The cross came out coated in mud. It was wheeled on a makeshift cart to the Limonaia, a lemon house in the Boboli Gardens turned into a first-aid room for paintings on wood, and from there to the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence's state conservation workshop. More than half of its painted surface was gone.
In that state, the crucifix soon became the symbol, all over the world, of the Florence flood.
It came back to Santa Croce in 1976, after exhibitions in Europe and America, with its gaps left visible. In 2013 it was hung in the sacristy, higher than before, out of reach of the river.
At a Glance
Artist: Cimabue (Cenni di Pepo, about 1240 to after 1302)
Painted: Before 1288
Medium: Tempera and gold on wood
Size: 433 × 390 cm (170 1/2 × 153 1/2 in)
Where to see it: Basilica of Santa Croce, sacristy, Florence, Italy
11. Jan Styka, The Crucifixion (1896)
On a rocky hill outside Jerusalem, Christ stands before the cross on which he is about to die, and a crowd covers the slopes around him. Jan Styka, a Polish painter, finished this panorama of the Crucifixion in 1896, on a canvas some 195 feet wide. In 1904 he brought it to the World's Fair in St. Louis, where it proved too large to be shown. Unable to pay the duties to ship it home, he sailed back to Poland without it.