Crucifixion

To feel the mood of this painting, remember what Venice had just lived through. Between 1575 and 1577 plague swept the city and killed something like a third of its people, among them the aged Titian, the grand old man of Venetian painting. The bright, sunlit world Veronese was famous for goes dark here. Painted around 1580, his Crucifixion is stormy and grief-struck, closer to the turbulent drama of his rival Tintoretto than to his own earlier feasts. Heavy clouds gather over the cross, the light turns cold, and the crowd below churns with alarm. In the distance the city of Jerusalem sits under the same bruised sky. It is Christ's death shown as something that shakes everyone in the frame, and it was painted in a city that had just buried a great many of its own.