Painted Crucifix

In Umbria in the second half of the 1200s, painters working for the new Franciscan churches showed Christ on the cross already dead, head dropped onto his shoulder, body sagging to one side, to move the faithful to pity. This cross is one of them. Mourners fill the side panels, the Virgin with a holy woman on one side, Saint John with a second figure on the other, and the plaque at the top reads Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. In 1880 a Paris priest gave it to the priests of Saint-Sulpice. In 1972 they offered it at auction, catalogued only as Italian school, 13th century, and it did not sell. The Friends of the Louvre bought it for the museum in 1981. The round nail heads studding the border are later, the Louvre notes, and so is the moulding around the edge.