Deposition

Van Dyck was about 20 when he painted this, in Antwerp, where he was working as an assistant to Rubens. It is his second run at a subject he had already treated a few years before, in a version now in Munich dated to about 1615. Almost nothing from those Antwerp years carries a date, so the Ashmolean gives this one as around 1619 and leaves it there. What changed on the second attempt is the weight. Christ's body drags down through the whole lower half of the canvas and the blood is not tidied away. When the Prado gathered his early work in 2012, this was among the pictures used to show how hard the young painter was pushing. At the bottom, among the nails and the crown of thorns, lies the board from the cross, lettered in Hebrew, Greek and Latin as the gospel of John says it was. Charles Maude gave the painting to Oxford in 1869.