Golgotha

A Golgotha is the hill outside Jerusalem where Christ was crucified, and by the 1530s a painting of that subject was expected above all to fix the eye on the cross and keep it there. This panel, made around 1532, pulls the other way. The crucifixion stands inside a wide, busy landscape crowded with tiny figures, soldiers, riders and onlookers each about their own day, so that the death at the center has to share the ground with the ordinary traffic all around it. The man who painted it is a mystery. He signed one surviving panel with a knot of interlocked letters that no one has ever fully untangled, and nothing else, so he is known only by that monogram and by Brunswick, the German town where the signed picture hangs. This Golgotha is one of the biblical scenes he filled with the crowd of everyday life. He was at work in Antwerp in the second quarter of the 16th century, and beyond some 20 years of paintings like this one he leaves no trace at all.