Crucifixion

The Master of the Colmar Crucifixion's Crucifixion, painted around 1455 and now in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, is the work that gives this anonymous Upper Rhenish master his name — an artist who worked in or near Colmar, the Alsatian city that would later be home to Grünewald's devastating Isenheim Altarpiece. This Crucifixion demonstrates the emotional intensity of Upper Rhenish devotional painting in the mid-fifteenth century, a tradition shaped by the mystical spirituality of the Dominican and Franciscan orders that had been deeply rooted in the Upper Rhine valley since the thirteenth century.

Tempera and oil on panel. Christ's figure on the cross is rendered with characteristic Upper Rhenish expressionism — the body contorted by suffering, the face bearing the marks of agony. Attending figures express grief with the direct emotional intensity of the German Gothic tradition.