磔刑

King Philip II of Spain was the great patron of Titian's old age. For the last 25 years of the painter's life the king commissioned almost everything he made, and much of it ended up here, in the monastery-palace Philip was raising at El Escorial outside Madrid. This Crucifixion hangs in the sacristy, and it belongs to Titian's late manner, when he worked in near-darkness with loose, smoky strokes and let the figures loom out of a black ground. There is little drama staged around the cross, just the body against the night sky. The canvas entered the Escorial in 1574, two years before Titian died in Venice in 1576. In 2018 it fell from the wall during a display and tore, though the figure of Christ came through the accident untouched.