The Crucifixion

Above the cross, a long-necked white bird stabs its own breast to feed its young. The gallery's label calls it a stork. The emblem is normally the pelican, and it came from Latin Europe, where it stood for the sacrifice of Christ. On a gold-ground panel built on Byzantine rules, that bird tells you where the work was made. Pavias painted in Candia on Crete, the Venetian island that became the centre of Greek painting in the decades after Constantinople fell in 1453, and Italian habits of storytelling reached its workshops. Hence the crowding, which Orthodox crucifixion scenes rarely have: soldiers casting lots for the garment, spectators in exotic hats, horses, the dead rising at the lower left, and a sharp-angled building that recalls the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Cretan painters copied the arrangement for generations afterwards, among them Georgios Klontzas.