Christ Carrying the Cross with the Virgin and Saint John

By the 1560s and 70s, the most intense religious painting in Spain was often not the altarpiece on a church wall. It was made small, for one person to kneel in front of in a private oratory or a bedchamber, and this panel is one of those objects. Morales brings three half-length figures right up to the surface: Christ bent under the cross, and close beside him his mother and the young Saint John, who meet him on the road to Calvary. There is no crowd and no landscape, none of the noise of the event, only the three faces held close enough to read every expression. He worked far from the court, in the provincial towns of Extremadura, and he returned to this Passion subject many times for clients who wanted it for private devotion. The smooth, enamel-like finish he gave to the skin and the tears was made to hold a worshipper's eye for a long time. Behind the three figures there is only a plain dark ground, the near-black background Morales used again and again in his small devotional panels.