Kreuzigung

This panel once sat along the base of a towering altarpiece Mantegna painted in the late 1450s for the church of San Zeno in Verona, commissioned by its abbot. It stayed there for over three centuries until French troops carried it off in 1798, in the wave of art Napoleon's campaigns pulled out of Italy. In 1815 the main altarpiece went home to Verona, but this predella scene never did. What hangs in San Zeno today is a copy, and the original is here in Paris. Mantegna set the three crosses on a paved, rocky height that looks almost archaeological, the kind of ground he loved to reconstruct from Roman ruins. Below, the soldiers divide Christ's tunic by casting lots, heads bent over the game while the women grieve to one side.