Le Couronnement d'épines

Titian took this commission around 1542 for a confraternity in Milan, for a chapel given over to the sufferings of the Passion. Look at how Christ's twisting body is built. The pose comes straight from the Laocoon, the ancient marble of a priest and his sons crushed by serpents that had been dug out of a Roman vineyard only a few decades earlier and had every artist in Italy talking. Titian folds that antique agony into a Gospel scene, the rods driving the crown of thorns down while a heavy classical wall presses the figures forward into our space. The painting left Milan for Paris in 1797, carried off as spoils after Napoleon's army took the city, which is how it ended up on a wall of the Louvre.