La Crucifixión de Cristo

This small panel was painted in Prague around 1340, a generation before the city became an imperial capital under Charles IV and one of the great centres of Europe. Bohemian painters were then absorbing what was arriving from Italy, the softer modelling and crowded, emotional grouping of Sienese art, and folding it into something of their own. Whoever made this managed it so completely that scholars have argued ever since over whether the hand was Bohemian or Austrian. The work takes its name not from that unknown master but from Richard von Kaufmann, the Berlin collector who once owned it. It was most likely the centre of a small folding altarpiece, the wings long since lost.