Calvary

Title: Calvary
Artist: Nikolai Ge
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 278 x 223 cm
Date: 1892
Location: Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

John 19:18 There they crucified him, and with him two others—one on each side and Jesus in the middle.

Ge reworked this canvas several times, as evidenced by the figure of the Roman centurion looming up unfinished, or partly repainted, in the background. He tried by formal means to translate the moral torment and suffering by accentuating the expressiveness of the faces, and refusing the academic vision of an ideal, inhuman body, unaltered by the Passion. The dramatic lighting intensifies the violent emotion that he wanted to trigger in the spectator. The work was considered shocking and near-blasphemous, and Tsar Alexander ordered it to be withdrawn from the 22nd exhibition of the Itinerants where it was shown for the first time.

Nikolai Nikolayevich Ge (February 1831 –June 1894), a Russian artist, was born into a noble family of French origin. His parents died when he was young and he was raised by his serf nurse, who taught him compassion for the humiliated and a keen sense of other people’s sorrows. Ge entered the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1850, graduating in 1857 with a Major Gold Medal for his picture The Witch of Endor Calling up the Spirit of the Prophet Samuel. He traveled extensively over the next dozen years, finally settling in St. Petersburg in 1870 where he became one of the founders of the Peredvizhniki, the Society of Traveling Art Exhibitions. He was not a practicing Orthodox, but was deeply influenced by morality and Christian spirituality. He spent the last years of his life working on a cycle of paintings of the Passion of Christ, under the influence of the progressive writer Leo Tolstoy.

Christ Carrying the Cross

Title: Christ Carrying the Cross
Artist: Luis de Morales
Medium: Oil on wood
Size: tbd.
Date: 1566
Location: Museo del Pariarca, Valencia

John 19:17 Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha).

It is not known why the place was called Skull (calvaria in Latin, hence the name Calvary), but the fact that Joseph had a tomb close by suggests this was not a place of public execution. The notion that the landscape had the appearance of a skull is possible, as evidenced by the hill near Gordon's Calvary today, though the shape of this particular hill is more recent than the first century.

Luis de Morales (c. 1520, Badajoz - 1586, Badajoz) was a Spanish painter. He worked for most of his life in Badajoz, a town on the Portuguese border, and his style, formed away from the influence of the court or great religious and artistic centres such as Seville, is highly distinctive. His pictures are usually fairly small and he concentrated on devotional images. He painted numerous versions of the Virgin and Child, and touching visions inspired by the theme of the Pieta, which are among his most popular works. The piety of his work has earned him the nickname 'El Divino'. This painting was inspired by a painting of the same subject by Sebastiano del Piombo.

Way to Calvary

Title: Way to Calvary

Artist: Duccio di Buoninsegna

Medium: Tempera on panel

Size: 51 × 53 cm

Date: 1308-11

Location: Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena.

Mark 15: 21-22 A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross. They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means The Place of the Skull).

Cyrene was in what is now Libya in North Africa, and included a large Jewish community. In all likelihood he was a devout pilgrim who had come to Jerusalem for Passover. It is not clear why he was compelled into service by the Roman soldiers. Presumably Jesus had been so weakened by the torture and abuse he faced that he had become too weak to carry the heavy cross any further. After his hours of agonized praying in Gethsemane he had gone from one weary trial to another, and had not had a bite of food or a drop of water since the Last Supper the night before.

Tradition states Simon’s sons Rufus and Alexander became missionaries; the inclusion of their names in Mark suggests that they were of some standing in the early Christian community at Rome. It has even been suggested that the Rufus mentioned by Paul in Romans 16:13 is the son of Simon of Cyrene. Some also link Simon himself with the "men of Cyrene" who preached the Gospel to the Greeks in Acts 11:20.

Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1255-1260 – c. 1318-1319) was one of the most influential Italian artists of his time, born in Siena, Tuscany. Duccio is trained in the rigid Byzantine style of painting but succeeds in adding more life and emotion to his work than his predecessors. He contributed to the creation of the International Gothic style and his influence reached as far as Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti. At his death, Duccio left his wife Taviana and seven children, of which at least two were later to become painters.

Calvary

Title: Calvary

Artist: Ugolino-Lorenzetti

Medium: Tempera on panel

Size: 91.5 x 55.5 cm

Date: 1340-60

Location: The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

Calvary, or Golgotha, is the hill in Jerusalem that was the site of Jesus' Crucifixion. The hill was outside the Old City walls of Jerusalem and near the sepulcher where Jesus was said to have been afterward interred. Details of the event are recorded in John 19:25-27 “Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, ‘Dear woman, here is your son,’ and to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.”

This painting captures these events in John. In the left group we can identify the Virgin Mary, falling senseless into the hands of Mary Magdalene and John the Evangelist. To the right is the Roman centurion, who came to believe in Christ. In the elongated proportions of the figures, in the artist's attempt to convey the emotional state of his characters, one can feel the influence of Gothic art. The artist used the traditional gold background and "reverse perspective", by which the figures present at Christ's execution are portrayed as a single mass extending vertically, their heads one above the other. At the same time he sought to convey the depth of space by showing the figures at the foot of the cross just half the size of those in the foreground.

Ugolino Lorenzetti (or Ugolino-Lorenzetti) is an invented name for an unknown artist midway between the styles of Ugolino da Siena and the Lorenzetti. Also known as the Ovile Master (Maestro di San Pietro Ovile), he has been tentatively identified with Bartolommeo Bulgarini (active c. 1347-d. 1378) who is known to have been a painter. Ugolino-Lorenzetti is a name invented to cover a group of stylistically similar works, which are marked by a more gentle Byzantine style.