Crucifixion

Among the crowd coming down from Calvary walks a figure no Gospel puts there, a cardinal of the Roman Church. The Castelvecchio museum reads him as a clear sign that the painter had taken the Protestant side, in the decades when the ideas of Martin Luther were spreading through the towns of the Low Countries.

The panel is small, about 44 centimetres high, and full of such surprises. One of the soldiers in their brightly coloured helmets copies the classical pose of Silenus, the drunken companion of Bacchus, riding his donkey. In the foreground, among faces twisted into grotesques in the manner of Hieronymus Bosch, a brawl breaks out, the kind of scene that Netherlandish painters would later turn into pictures of everyday life.

For a long time the panel was given to Lucas van Leyden. The museum now refers it to a painter not yet identified, who worked at the same time as Lucas in the Leiden workshop of their master Cornelis Engebrechtsz., and it calls this the most interesting Flemish work in the Veronese collections.