The Crucifixion

When the American painter Benjamin West arrived in Rome in 1760, he found that the Italian artists there, as he later put it, thought of nothing and looked at nothing but the work of Pompeo Batoni. Two years later Batoni painted this Crucifixion. His fame and most of his income came from portraits of popes, kings and British travellers on the Grand Tour, so a devotional canvas like this is one of the rarer things from his hand. Christ hangs between the Virgin in blue and Saint John in red. At the foot of the cross lies a skull, from the old tradition that Adam was buried on Golgotha, the hill where the cross stood. Nobody knows who ordered the picture. It is said to have come from a collection in Genoa, surfaced with a Roman dealer in 1987, and was bought by the museum in Boston that same year.