Kreuzigung

By about 1630 van Dyck was back in Antwerp, in the few settled years between his long stay in Italy and the day he left for the English court of Charles I. Local churches wanted altarpieces, and the Franciscan friars of Lille commissioned this Crucifixion for the high altar of their convent. You can still see Italy in it. The loosened reddish hair of Mary Magdalene and the warm, stormy sky come straight out of the Venetian painters he had copied for years, above all Titian. He set the cross off to one side and at a slight angle rather than dead centre, so the scene opens into depth. When French revolutionaries dissolved the convent in the 1790s, the picture was seized, and it became one of the founding works of the museum in Lille that keeps it today.