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While walking through the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, the painting, Jerusalem (Golgatha, Consummatum Est, Crucifixion) by Jean-Léon Gérôme caught my eye.  It did not catch my eye because of the style, but due to the treatment of the subject.  This is an interesting painting because it is the classical crucifixion theme redone in a way that I have not seen before.  The cross itself is not visible.  Instead one views the shadows of the three laden cross as they fall across the rocky ground.  Christ is not in the picture, but does that weaken the story?  There are symbols of the darkness that clothed the day for three hours according to the account of the event in Mark 15:33.    Jerusalem is lit up in the background and darkness like a curtain is falling (or lifting) from the right upper corner.  The darkness blocked the light and there is a shadow that divides the city of Jerusalem from the place of the skull. One sees a distant caravan of people walking in the background.  They are passing by the scene, rather than crowding around the crosses as is pictured in other versions of the story.  The shadows of the crosses stretch lonely across the foreground.

While in the Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany another more contemporary crucifixion and rather graphic image by Lovis Corinth, captured my attention.  His work is entitled The Red Christ and was completed in 1922.  This Christ has depleted outstretched limbs complimented with thick red blood.  The support is covered with swirling areas of color and large areas of paint.  Out of this mess is an experience of the horrific moment that Christ was stuck with a spear.  A crowd is depicted around the cross, with all but one or two figures indistinguishable.  Out of the works in this post, this piece, best depicts the horrific nature of the death on the cross.

These are four different scenes of the same story.  The paintings were done in four different centuries over five hundred years.  Style changed.  The message had different emphasis, but the story is the same.

Art has the power to teach us something new about the mundane in life.  Sometimes art portrays the beautiful, sometimes the ugly.  This past fall when I had the opportunity to walk through several museums in the Netherlands and Germany, I came across four paintings that presented the biblical account of the crucifixion of Christ in unexpected or at least different ways.  They present four artist perspectives from painters who lived in four different centuries.
Perhaps the oldest Crucifixion image that entranced me while visiting museums last fall was a painting done in 1512 by Hans Baldung, The Crucifixion.  I found it in the Gemaldegalerie museum Berlin, Germany.  Partially, I was caught off guard by the interpretation of the cross being an actual tree stump instead of a slab of wood.   The closer I looked the more I captivated I was in the anguished face of the girl who clung to the foot of the cross.  This is most likely a portrayal of Mary Magdalene who is often portrayed in medieval Christian art as a symbol of a penitent sinner.  Her emotion and posture attracted me to this particular image.

There was a series of paintings that Rembrandt van Rijn did concerning the life of Christ in the Alte Pinakothek Museum in Munich, Germany.  I may mention the series later, but one in the series was of the crucifixion.  This painting is interesting because it captures the moment when the cross is hoisted into an upright position.  While two thugs push and pull it into place,  there is a third figure bracing the cross.  The third figure is a self-portrait of Rembrandt.  He is placing himself among the others who are crucifying Christ.  He is saying that he, like them, is a sinner.

(Rembrandt is in the center near Christ’s feet)