The Crucifixion of Christ

This tall panel holds more than one moment of Good Friday. Christ hangs between the two thieves. Below the cross Mary clasps her hands and looks up, and John in red steadies her by the shoulder. At the left, among the soldiers, a rider on a white horse holds a long lance upright. Then, small in the background on the right, mourners already kneel around a body laid out on a white cloth, the lament that follows the descent from the cross. The Belvedere catalogues the painter only as an unnamed master from the Danube region. Its own photo caption is less cautious, calling it the work of a follower of Lucas Cranach the Elder, around 1520, with a question mark after the region, while the catalogue entry gives just the 15th century. Cranach himself had worked in Vienna in the first years of the 1500s. The museum bought it from the Viennese dealer Friedrich Schwarz in 1912.