Christ on the Cross

David painted this crucifixion in 1782, and the timing is worth holding onto. He was a young Neoclassical star, back from years of study in Rome, and still a decade away from the Revolution that would make him its official artist, the man who designed its festivals and voted to send King Louis the Sixteenth to the guillotine. Religious pictures are rare in his work. This one was commissioned by the marshal Louis de Noailles and his wife for their family chapel in a Paris convent. David shows Christ alone against near-total darkness, a single beam of light falling across the pale body, the drama built from almost nothing but that contrast. The Noailles chapel did not survive the Revolution, and the canvas eventually made its way to a parish church in Macon, in Burgundy, where it still hangs.