The Crucifixion of Christ

Giorgio Vasari, the Florentine who wrote the lives of the artists, called Tintoretto the most extraordinary brain that painting had ever produced, and then complained that he passed off as finished works sketches so rough you could see the brushstrokes. This canvas, painted around 1550/55, shows what bothered him. The figures at the foot of the cross are almost without colour, struck out of a black sky by a supernatural light and set down with quick, open strokes. For a long time it was taken for an oil sketch for the vast Crucifixion Tintoretto painted in the mid-1560s for the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. The museum now treats it as a picture in its own right, and at almost two and a half metres wide it was never a small study. It came to the Alte Pinakothek from the Bavarian electors' gallery.