Christ on the Cross

Around 1475 a Sicilian painter, Antonello da Messina, arrived in Venice carrying the oil technique perfected in the Netherlands, where colour could be built in thin glazes that held the light. Bellini, already the leading painter in the city, took it up, and small devotional panels like this one come from those years. The subject is pared almost to nothing: Christ on the cross, alone, without the usual mourners at his feet, set against a wide, still landscape that runs back to distant hills. It was made to be prayed in front of, so the quiet of that countryside behind the body carries the feeling a crowd of grieving figures would carry in a larger altarpiece. The panel is small, a little over half a metre high, meant for a private room rather than a church.