Diptyque de la Crucifixion

Rogier van der Weyden painted this around 1460, near the end of his life, and it is one of the most severe things he ever made. Two panels. On one, Christ hangs dead on the cross. On the other, the Virgin collapses into the arms of John the Evangelist. There is almost no setting, no landscape, no crowd. Behind the figures hangs a single sheet of blood-red cloth against a bare grey wall, and that red is nearly the only colour in the whole work. The bleakness has led historians to think it was made for a Carthusian monastery, an order that lived in silence and near-total isolation. The red cloth is pushed toward the inner edges of both panels, part of how we know the two were always meant to hang together.