各各他

Van Dyck painted this Crucifixion in 1630 as the high altarpiece for a Franciscan convent in Lille. He was back in Antwerp then, home from a few years in Italy where he had soaked up Titian's warm colour, and he was turning out large religious pictures for churches across Flanders. Two years later he would leave all of it behind to become court painter to Charles the First in London, remembered ever after for his silky portraits of English aristocrats. This is the other van Dyck, the church painter. The name Golgotha means the place of the skull, and he set one at the foot of the cross, low in the earth beneath the mourning figures of Mary, John and Mary Magdalene.