The Small Crucifixion

In 1605, in Munich, the elderly Duke Wilhelm the Fifth of Bavaria had a favourite small picture copied as an engraving. It showed Christ on the cross with the Virgin and Saint John, and Mary Magdalene kneeling in prayer, and the duke loved it without knowing who had painted it. The engraving was made by the Flemish printmaker Raphael Sadeler, who worked in Munich. Years later the German painter and art writer Joachim von Sandrart supplied the name, Grünewald, and in his book of 1675 recalled how pleased the duke's son, Elector Maximilian, had been to learn it. Sandrart also described what made the panel so striking. The dead Christ hangs with his whole weight sunk onto his feet, which he thought truer to life than any other crucifix. After the Bavarian collection the trail goes quiet until 1922, when the panel surfaced with a collector in Essen. It then passed to the Haarlem banker Franz Koenigs, and in 1953 to the foundation of the American dime-store magnate Samuel H. Kress, which gave it to the National Gallery in Washington in 1961. It remains the only painting by Grünewald in the United States.