Christ Crucified

This is a piece cut out of another painting. Around 1800 someone sliced a small rectangle from the top of a panel by Cosmè Tura showing Saint Jerome kneeling in the wilderness. The crucified Christ in that rectangle was the vision Jerome was looking up at. The National Gallery in London bought the Jerome in 1867, already trimmed, with empty sky where the vision had been. The fragment turned up in a Ferrara collection, passed to a dealer in Venice, and in 1903 Brera bought it on the advice of the art historian Adolfo Venturi.

It measures 22 by 17 centimetres. Tura was the salaried painter of the Este dukes in Ferrara, and even at this size his drawing has its hard wiry edge, the body pulled taut and lit from the side. At the left a piece of rock runs to the cut and stops, the last scrap of the landscape this panel used to belong to.