The Crucifixion with Saint Jerome and Saint Francis

c. 1445/1450

Pesellino

Artist, Florentine, c. 1422 - 1457

A man wearing a dark ring of thorns around his head hangs from a wooden cross as two kneeling people look on in this vertical painting. All the people have pale skin with a greenish cast, and all three have gold, disk-like halos. On the cross, Jesus’s head tips forward, his gaze downcast. Bright red blood runs down the man’s arms from where his palms are nailed to the cross. Blood also pours from a gash over his right ribs, to our left, and from his feet, which overlap and are nailed to the cross. He is nude except for a transparent white cloth tied across his hips. Behind his shoulder-length blond hair and goatee, a scarlet-red cross is embedded in his halo. A red scroll above the across has the letters, “INRI,” and above the scroll, a long-necked, white bird set within a dark green nest pecks at its own chest, wings outstretched. Both of the men kneeling at the foot of the cross look up at Jesus. Both are barefoot and have bald heads with a fringe of hair. The man to our left wears a deep V-necked, ivory-white tunic that pools on the ground. His arms cross over his torso and he holds a string of beads in his left hand and a rock in the other. There is a red mark on his chest. The man to our right wears a long, brown hooded cloak. Blood trickles from the base of the cross onto the rose-pink, chisel-cut ground, to where a skull and two bones sit between the men. The land steeply rises to a jagged, barren pink mountain to our right, and dips down to a field with rows of dark green plants and a few trees to our left. Buildings cluster behind a mauve-pink city wall in the distance, and one of the buildings has a gold dome. The sky deepens from ice blue along the horizon to teal along a band of clouds that stretch behind Jesus’s torso. Charcoal-gray clouds fill in the space above the cross. Lines flicker off of a flaming, ruby-red orb in the sky to our left and a black orb hangs to our right.

Media Options

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On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 4

Artwork overview

  • Medium

    tempera on poplar panel

  • Credit Line

    Samuel H. Kress Collection

  • Dimensions

    overall: 61.5 x 49.1 cm (24 3/16 x 19 5/16 in.)
    framed: 96.5 x 75.6 x 10.2 cm (38 x 29 3/4 x 4 in.)

  • Accession

    1939.1.109

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Melzi collection, Milan.[1] (Robert Langton Douglas [1864-1951], London and Dublin);[2] sold to (Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Rome); sold July 1932 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York; [3] gift 1939 to NGA.
[1] The NGA Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture, Washington, D.C., 1941, mentions the Melzi collection, Milan, which is the provenance information given in the bill of sale to the Kress Foundation. Fern Rusk Shapley, in Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII-XV Century, London, 1966: 110, and Catalogue of the Italian Paintings, 2 vols., Washington, D.C., 1979: 1:364, refers to it as the collection of the Duchessa Melzi d'Eril in Milan, whose famous collection is known to have contained mostly Lombard paintings and only one Tuscan work, a tondo attributed to Ghirlandaio (see Guido Carotti, Capi d'arte appartenenti a S.E. la Duchessa Josephine Melzi d'Eril Barbo, Bergamo, 1901: 32, and Giulio Melzi d'Eril, La Galleria Melzi e il collezionismo milanese del tardo Settecento, Milan, 1973). There did exist in Milan, however, another collection with the same name, albeit less well-known--that of the lawyer Gennaro Melzi, who began to collect in the early years of this century; a part of this collection was placed at auction in 1928 (see La raccolta Melzi, Galleria Pesaro, Milan, 19-23 March 1928). The sale catalogue does not list the Gallery's painting, which could have been purchased privately either before or after the auction.
[2] See the letter of 1 May 1941 from Douglas to Edward Fowles of Duveen Brothers, in which Douglas writes: "I sold this picture to Count Contini." (Duveen Brothers Records, accession number 960015, Research Library, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles: Series II.I, Collectors' files, reel 299, box 244, folder 3, copy in NGA curatorial files.)
[3] The bill of sale for a polychrome wooden statue, two vases, a green velvet cope, a book of Piazzetta drawings, and ten paintings, including the Pesellino, which is titled Crucifixion and Two Saints, is dated 29 July 1932 (copy in NGA curatorial files). See also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/2127.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1935

  • Exposition de L'Art Italien de Cimabue à Tiepolo, Petit Palais, Paris, 1935, no. 358.

Bibliography

1935

  • “Europe’s Largesse.” Art News 33 (17 August 1935): 10, repro.

  • Serra, Luigi. “La mostra dell’antica arte italiana a Parigi.” Bollettino d’arte 29 (1935): 36.

1941

  • Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1941: 150-151, no. 220.

1942

  • Book of Illustrations. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1942: 243, repro. 166.

1944

  • Frankfurter, Alfred M. The Kress Collection in the National Gallery. New York, 1944: 29, repro.

1945

  • Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1945 (reprinted 1947, 1949): 43, repro.

1950

  • Collobi Ragghianti, Licia. “Zanobi Strozzi pittore – II.” Critica d’arte 23 (1950): 17.

1954

  • Ferguson, George. Signs and Symbols in Christian Art. New York, 1954: pl. III.

1959

  • Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 62, repro.

1963

  • Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Florentine School. 2 vols. London, 1963: 1:168.

1965

  • Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 100.

1966

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII-XV Century. London, 1966: 109-110, fig. 300.

1968

  • National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 89, repro.

1972

  • Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cambridge, MA, 1972: 162, 645

1975

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 264, repro.

1979

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. Washington, 1979: 1:364; 2:pl. 263.

1980

  • Ragghianti, Carlo L. “Galleria di Washington.” Critica d’Arte 45, nos. 154-156 (1980): 219.

  • Verdon, Timothy. Monastic Themes in Renaissance Art: A Walking Tour of Italian Paintings and Sculpture in the National Gallery. Washington, 1980: n.p. [13], repro.

1984

  • Walker, John. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Rev. ed. New York, 1984: 90, no. 51, color repro.

1985

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 303, repro.

1988

  • Wheeler, Marion, ed. His Face: Images of Christ in Art: Selections from the King James Version of the Bible. New York, 1988: no. 91, repro.

1990

  • Angelini, Alessandro. “Francesco Pesellino.” In Luciano Bellosi, ed. Pittura di luce: Giovanni di Francesco e l’arte fiorentina di metà Quattrocento. Exh. cat. Casa Buonarroti, Florence, 1990: 125.

1993

  • Ruda, Jeffrey. Fra Filippo Lippi: Life and Work with a Complete Catalogue. London, 1993: 494, pl. 385.

  • Gagliardi, Jacques. La conquête de la peinture: L’Europe des ateliers du XIIIe au XVe siècle. Paris, 1993: 384.

1997

  • Barstow, Kurtis. "The Gualenghi-d'Este Hours": Art and Devotion in Renaissance Ferrara. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1997: viii, 153, 327 fig. III.24.

1998

  • Faxon, Alicia Craig. “Sacrifice." In Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography: Themes Depicted in Works of Art. Edited by Helene E. Roberts. 2 vols. Chicago, 1998: 2:778.

2003

  • Boskovits, Miklós, and David Alan Brown, et al. Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century. The Systematic Catalogue of the National Gallery of Art. Washington, D.C., 2003: 569-573, color repro.

2015

  • Sonnevend, Margit. "La cuspide centrale di una smembrata pala d'altare di Pesellino nel Museo Cristiano di Esztergom." Acta Historiae Artium 56 (2015): 89-102, fig. 2.

  • Sonnevend, Margit. "Pesellino oltároromzat-töredéke az esztergomi Keresztény Múzeumban." Ars Hungarica 41, no. 3 (2015): 331-344, fig. 2.

Inscriptions

upper center on scroll: INRI (Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews)

Wikidata ID

Q20173644

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