The Crucifixion

c. 1445/1450

Sano di Pietro

Artist, Sienese, 1405 - 1481

A man is nailed to a wooden cross, and two people sit, one to each side, on the sand-colored ground with their bodies angled inward, all against a gold background in this horizontal painting. All the people have pale skin with a greenish cast, and gold halos. The crossbar of the T-shaped cross nearly touches the top edge of the composition. On the cross, Jesus’s body and head are angled to our left. His head tips down, and his eyes are dark slits. Scarlet-red blood streams down his arms from nails in each hand and spurts from a gash over his right ribs. Blood pours from the nail pinning both feet to a shallow ledge down to the ground below. His wavy, honey-blond hair falls over his shoulders, and he has a full, forked beard. Touches of red indicate blood at the points of a ring of thorns around his head. He is nude except for a white loincloth lined with gold down the front around his hips. His body is thin, his ribs visible. The ground around the cross is painted a flat, brown color, which rises in a low mound behind the base of the cross, and up to each side to indicate hills. To our left, a woman sits with one leg folded under her, her other knee raised by her intertwined hands. She looks up at Jesus, her mouth parted and lined with wrinkles. Her brows are gathered over brown eyes. Her face is framed by a white veil, and the powder-blue hood and robe she wears over it is edged with gold. The underside is canary yellow where it turns back across her lap and down the sides of her face. Her raspberry-pink dress underneath is also trimmed with gold at the high neckline and cuffs. She and the person to our right both have rosy cheeks. The person to our right sits with fingers intertwined around one raised knee. That person has chin-length blond hair, a short fringe of bangs across the forehead, arched brows, a long nose, and delicate pink lips are parted. A sky-blue robe is covered with a rose-pink cloak, both edged with gold. The gold background behind all the people is visibly cracked and some areas of red show through. Across the top of the panel is a band of punched dots and incised lines to create a floral pattern. The halos are created with concentric bands of dots and rings punched into the gold background.

Media Options

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On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 8

Artwork overview

  • Medium

    tempera on poplar panel

  • Credit Line

    Samuel H. Kress Collection

  • Dimensions

    overall: 24.1 x 33.6 cm (9 1/2 x 13 1/4 in.)
    framed: 33 x 44.1 x 4.3 cm (13 x 17 3/8 x 1 11/16 in.)

  • Accession

    1939.1.45

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Possibly Contessa Giustiniani, Genoa;[1] (Count Alessandro Contini Bonacossi, Rome); sold July 1930 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, New York;[2] gift 1939 to NGA.
[1] Of the members of various branches of the Giustiniani family in Genoa in 1930, Vincenzo, Paolo, and Giovanni Battista are recorded as having the title of Conte (see Vittorio Spreti, Enciclopedia storico-nobiliare italiana, Milan, 1930: 3:497). Presumably the collection that included the NGA painting belonged to one of them and was a recently formed one. Fern Rusk Shapley (Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools XVI-XVIII Century, London, 1973: 429) lists in the index of former owners five paintings that passed from Contessa Giustiniani through Contini Bonacossi to the Kress Collection in 1930. (The bill of sale that includes these paintings [see following note] lists two others that are also referred to on the bill as "from the Collection of Countess Giustiniani, Genoa," although they are indexed in Shapley under Max Bondi and not Giustiniani.) Two of the five paintings indexed under the Giustiniani name appear to have been on the market just a few years before they passed to the Kress Collection: the Virgin and Child with Saints, attributed to the Master of San Lucchese (attributed to Jacopo di Cione by Shapley and to Giottino on the bill of sale), which now belongs to the De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco (no. 61-44-2), was sold with other paintings of the Max Bondi collection (including the two mentioned above that Shapley indexes under Bondi) only in 1929 (Milan, Galleria Lurati, 9-20 December, no. 44); and the Sleeping Girl by Giuseppe Angeli (listed as by Giovanni Piazzetta on the bill), now in the Chazen Musem of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, no. 61.4.2, was still exhibited in 1925 in Berlin as part of the Grabowsky collection (Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum Verein, Gemälde Alter Meister aus berliner Besitz, June-August 1925, Berlin, no. 229).
[2] The bill of sale for several paintings, including the NGA 1939.1.45, is dated 15 July 1930 (copy in NGA curatorial files); see also The Kress Collection Digital Archive, https://kress.nga.gov/Detail/objects/2113.

Associated Names

Bibliography

1941

  • Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1941: 176, no. 156.

1942

  • Book of Illustrations. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1942: 242, repro. 182.

1944

  • Frankfurter, Alfred M. The Kress Collection in the National Gallery. New York, 1944: repro. no. 85

1945

  • Paintings and Sculpture from the Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1945 (reprinted 1947, 1949): 42, repro.

1946

  • Seymour, Charles, and Hanns Swarzenski. “A ‘Madonna of Humility’ and Quercia’s Early Style.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 30 (1946): 141-142.

1959

  • Paintings and Sculpture from the Samuel H. Kress Collection. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1959: 43, repro.

1965

  • Summary Catalogue of European Paintings and Sculpture. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1965: 120.

1966

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Paintings from the Samuel H. Kress Collection: Italian Schools, XIII-XV Century. London, 1966: 144-145, fig. 388.

1968

  • National Gallery of Art. European Paintings and Sculpture, Illustrations. Washington, 1968: 107, repro.

  • Berenson, Bernard. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. Central Italian and North Italian Schools. 3 vols. London, 1968: 1:383.

1972

  • Fredericksen, Burton B., and Federico Zeri. Census of Pre-Nineteenth Century Italian Paintings in North American Public Collections. Cambridge, MA, 1972: 182, 645.

1974

  • European Paintings before 1500. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, 1974: 114.

1975

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Summary Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1975: 318, repro.

1979

  • Shapley, Fern Rusk. Catalogue of the Italian Paintings. 2 vols. Washington, 1979: 1:413; 2:pl. 293.

1985

  • European Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1985: 366, repro.

1989

  • Os, Hendrik W. van, J. R. J. van Asperen de Boer, C. E. de Jong-Janssen, and Charlotte Wiefhoff, eds. The Early Sienese Paintings in Holland. Translated by Michael Hoyle. Florence, 1989: 116-117.

1998

  • Frinta, Mojmír S. Punched Decoration on Late Medieval Panel and Miniature Painting. Prague, 1998: 426.

  • Knauf, Marion. "Sano di Pietro's Madonna Panels: A Survey and Catalogue Riasonne of his Madonna and Child Pictures for Private Devotion." Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, Bloomington, 1998: 223.

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: 613-616, color repro.

2007

  • Loseries, Wolfgang, and Dóra Sallay. "La predella di Sano di Pietro per il polittico di San Giovanni Battista all'Abbadia Nuova: ricostruzione e iconografia." Prospettiva , no. 126-127 (April-July 2007): 92-104, fig. 7.

2015

  • Sallay, Dóra. Corpus of Sienese Paintings in Hungary 1420-1510. Florence, 2015: 98, fig. 7.

Wikidata ID

Q20173633

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