The Crucifixion of Christ

Around 1510 to 1520, painters working along the Danube, in Bavaria and Austria, began to give landscape a weight it seldom had in religious pictures. Art historians later grouped them as the Danube School, and the Belvedere counts this panel's unnamed painter among them. A bare, splintered tree rises at the left edge, and low on the horizon the sky glows red beneath a darkening band. In the foreground Mary sinks to the ground, held up by John in red, while a woman in a red hood leans in beside her. On the other side of the cross stands a soldier in plate armour and a red tunic with gold stripes, the dress of the painter's own day, lifting one open hand. He is probably the centurion who, in the Gospels, calls Christ the Son of God. The museum bought the panel from a private owner in Vienna in 1914.