Crucifixion of Christ

Christ is still alive on this cross: the head is lifted, not fallen. Behind him Velazquez opens a landscape, trees on one side, hills and a distant city on the other, and a skull lying among the stones at the foot of the beam. Look at the feet. They rest side by side, each fixed with its own nail. Four nails instead of three was a deliberate choice in Seville, argued for by Pacheco, the painter's teacher and father-in-law, and used again in the great Christ of San Placido. This canvas is signed and dated 1631, odd in a painter who almost never signed his work, and that signature is one reason it has divided historians; some give it to his workshop. The museum keeps it under his name. It came from a convent of Bernardine nuns in Madrid, which handed it to the State in 1946.