The Crucifixion

Pieter Aertsen's 1549 Crucifixion at the Mauritshuis belongs to the final years of Flemish altarpiece production before the iconoclastic crisis of the late 1560s swept away much of the devotional art of the Low Countries. Aertsen's early career was shaped by altarpiece production for Netherlandish churches, and this work represents his command of the central devotional subject in Christian painting — Christ on the cross flanked by the two thieves, with the mourning figures below. The Mauritshuis, which specialises in Dutch and Flemish Golden Age painting, holds it as an important document of the transition from late Flemish Mannerism toward the more naturalistic conventions of the following decades.

The panel support is appropriate to an altarpiece-scale devotional work. Aertsen organises the vertical format around the dominant cross, the landscape and sky behind calibrated to give Christ's figure maximum visual weight. The flesh tones of the three crucified figures are differentiated — Christ's body ideally modelled, the thieves more roughly treated — through subtle variations in paint texture and colour temperature.