Bearing of the Cross

Rubens had spent eight years in Italy, studying Titian in Venice and Caravaggio in Rome, and he came home to Antwerp in 1608 with all of it in his hands. Within a couple of years he was the busiest painter in the city, court painter to the Spanish governors and at work on the huge altarpieces of the cross for Antwerp's churches. This small oak panel belongs to that same stretch of work. It shows Christ sunk under the weight of the cross on the road to Calvary, with Simon of Cyrene stepping in to take the load and Veronica among the crowd. On a panel barely two feet high, Rubens packs in the straining bodies and deep shadow he had brought back from Italy. It entered the National Museum in Warsaw in 1966.