Christ Carrying the Cross

early 1620s

Cornelis van Poelenburch

Associated Names
Cornelis van Poelenburch
Painter, Dutch, 1594/1595 - 1667
A tightly packed crowd of about two dozen men and women surges out of a fortified stone ruin in this horizontal painting. The building fills the right half of the composition and extends off the top edge. Shrubs and vegetation grow on fragments of architecture that loom behind the crowd. Near the front of the crowd, a man wearing a lilac-purple robe kneels, bracing the crossbeam of a wooden cross over one shoulder. He wears a ring of thorns on his head, and he looks back over his shoulder so his face turns to us. His fingers are interlaced over the crossbeam, which is tied with rope. A muscled, bare-chested man wearing ruby-red, knee-length britches and an ax tied around his waist pulls the rope. A woman wearing a blue dress, yellow robe, and white veil holds out a piece of white fabric to our right. Just beyond the cross, two men walk with their hands tied behind their back, their heads down. They are nude except for gray cloths tied across their hips. To our right in the crowd, a woman wearing a white head covering and rose-pink dress under a voluminous, azure-blue robe stands with her fingers interlaced. A second woman, in slate blue, stands next to her, looking at and pointing to her. The other men in the crowd wear turbans, feathered caps, or are bareheaded. Some wear tunics and some are bare chested. Two men on horseback bring up the rear of the crowd, under the tall rectangular doorway leading into the building. A man wearing armor rides a rearing, brown and white dappled horse in front of the crowd, to our left. Four men walk farther along the path where it disappears behind another fragment of a building, also overgrown with plants. More people, painted ghostly white, walk along the path where it curves into the deep distance between rolling hills. A grove with bushes, palm trees, and trees with rounded canopies grows in the distance to our right. White and flint-gray clouds roll across the pale blue sky above.

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Cornelis van Poelenburch, one of the most renowned Dutch painters of his time, had a remarkable ability to evoke the distant past, whether in the Holy Land or the Italian countryside near Rome. In his works, a silvery light, softened and diffused by gentle clouds that spread across blue skies, quietly floods the gently rolling countryside, giving it an aura of age and venerability. His nuanced atmospheric effects were further enhanced by the inclusion of ancient ruins, which provided a visual and historical framework for the small-scale mythological and biblical figures that populate his landscapes, such as those seen in Christ Carrying the Cross. In this work, painted in Rome, he has adapted the ancient Tomb of Cecilia Metella on the Appian Way, built around 50 BC, into the large ruin on the right.

Christ, wearing a purple robe and a crown of thorns and struggling under the weight of the cross, looks back at the kneeling Veronica, who holds the linen cloth on which Christ’s image was miraculously imprinted when she wiped the sweat and blood off his brow. The group around them includes not only Christ’s tormentors but, more important, the sorrowful friends and family who accompany Christ to Golgotha: the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and behind them John the Evangelist, who covers his eyes in grief with the sleeve of his red robe. The elderly men with blue hats in the middle of the crowd are almost certainly Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who later would assist in Christ’s burial. The group is led by the Roman centurion Longinus, fierce on his rearing steed.

Poelenburch’s interpretation of Christ Carrying the Cross belongs to a long pictorial tradition, yet its character is surprisingly different from earlier examples in northern and Italian art. While most artists created vertical compositions that focused closely on Christ and the figures immediately surrounding him, Poelenburch chose to depict relatively small figures in an extensive Italianate landscape, which serves as a natural stage for this dramatic moment from the New Testament.

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Artwork overview

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century: Christ Carrying the Cross, early 1620s

This horizontal painting shows a group of eight light-skinned musicians and onlookers gathered closely around a rectangular, carpet-covered table. The front edge of the table runs parallel to the bottom edge of the painting, and seems close to us. Shown from about the waist up, the men and women’s vivid lapis-blue, coral-red, buttercup-yellow, lilac-purple, and moss-green garments fall in crisp folds. Bright reflections on the fabric suggest a satin-like material. Two women wear feathers in their hair and one man’s hat is plumed. One man, wearing crimson red and black, sits with his back to us to our left on the near side of the table. He holds the neck of a bass viol, about the size of a cello, with his left hand, and points to pages of an open music book with the bow in his right hand. The other people cluster on the far side of the table. A man to the left plays a violin; a woman at the center plays a guitar-sized bandora, and a woman to our right plays a lute. The musicians, along with a man who leans over the table from between the two women, look down at the music books. A young man behind the woman at the center holds up a glass of pale liquid with his right hand as he touches his left forefinger to his smiling lips. A man and woman stand close together in the background to our right, in the top right corner of the canvas.

Scholarly Series:  Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Private collection, Paris;[1] (Galerie Claude Vittet, Paris); purchased 11 April 2007 by NGA.

[1] Claude Vittet, in an e-mail of 14 January 2007 to Molli Kuenstner (in NGA curatorial files), writes that the painting had "not been seen on the market since probably the beginning of the XVIIIth century."

Associated Names

Exhibition History

2021

  • Clouds, Ice, and Bounty: The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund Collection of Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2021, no. 7, repro.

Bibliography

2007

  • Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. "Cornelis van Poelenburch, Christ Carrying the Cross." National Gallery of Art Bulletin, no. 36 (Spring 2007): 16-17, color repro.

Wikidata ID

Q20176982

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