Crucifixion

Around 1626 Anthony van Dyck was in his late twenties and several years into a long stay in Italy, mostly in Genoa, where he studied Titian and the Venetians until their warm colour was part of his own hand. He had learned his trade before that as Rubens's leading assistant back in Antwerp. This Crucifixion belongs to those years, a fairly intimate treatment of the subject, only about a metre wide, rather than one of the towering altarpieces he could also produce. It has long hung in the Church of Our Lady in Bruges, a church better known for another visitor in marble: Michelangelo's Madonna and Child, the one sculpture that left Italy while its maker was still alive.