Unknown Artist - Crucifixion

A popular iconography throughout the history of Western art, the Crucifixion has its origins in the early Christian era and has developed over the centuries, culminating in the most recent expressions of contemporary art. The traditional iconography of Jesus on the cross has infinite variations, from the simplest, accompanied only by the "mourners"—the Madonna and St. John the Evangelist—to the occasion for large choral scenes. It is often also accompanied by symbolic elements, such as the presence of the sun and moon or Adam's skull beneath Christ's cross.

Stylistically, the work can be fully classified within the Mannerist context, both for its compositional and formal characteristics. Indeed, the work exhibits the typical anti-naturalistic constraints typical of mid-16th-century Mannerist painting. As mentioned, compositionally, we note a total compression of the scene; the characters are all crowded into the foreground, where the space is completely saturated. There is great dramatic tension, created by an artificial exaggeration of gestures that seem to follow the three main directions indicated by the three crosses. The work has a blocked, symmetrical structure, elegantly contradicted only by the complementary positions of the horses at the two extremities. Formally, the treatment of the painting's surface is typically Mannerist, with few pictorial or atmospheric effects. Indeed, over the tonal values ​​of the color, the drawing is clearly predominant, creating a complex linear system. Note, in this regard, the curved and sharp features, of an exquisitely Mannerist elegance, that compose the forms of the horses.

The painter who painted this Crucifixion appears to belong to a Mannerist style, given his interpretation of the episode, which is loaded with anti-naturalistic overtones and the dramatization, poised between exasperation and artifice, consistent with the aesthetics of the mid-16th century. Given the artist's penchant for drawing, he would appear to be closer to a Tuscan, or at least central Italian, circle. However, the dark, burnished atmosphere, with the cloud-filled sky, brings him closer to the Venetian Tintoretto, whose Crucifixion in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco has a similar iconography.

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