The Crucifixion

This is early Tintoretto, painted in Venice around 1550, when he was still in his early thirties and making his name. It is not the enormous Crucifixion he would fill a whole wall with 15 years later, but a smaller, quieter telling of the scene. Look past the three crosses and the picture opens into a wide landscape with distant hills, painted in a way Venetians had picked up from Netherlandish artists, whose small deep vistas were much admired and copied in the city. Riders trail off along the road into that far country. The Spanish scholar Alfonso Pérez Sánchez pointed to those small horsemen as a source for the ones El Greco would set into his own crucifixion scenes a generation later, after the young Cretan came to Venice and studied Tintoretto. The painting now hangs a long way from either place, in the Museo Soumaya in Mexico City.