Crucifixion

Giorgio Vasari's Crucifixion, now in Santa Maria del Carmine, is one of many altarpiece Crucifixion images he produced for Florentine and Tuscan churches as part of his extensive activity as a religious painter. The Carmelite church in Florence had a venerable tradition of important painted commissions, most notably Masaccio's Brancacci Chapel frescoes, which meant that any new painting there would be viewed in the context of Florentine artistic heritage. Vasari's Mannerist Crucifixion would have represented a deliberate updating of the subject for Counter-Reformation devotional requirements — emotional intensity, doctrinal clarity, and technical brilliance combined. His treatment of the Crucifixion typically emphasised the mourning figures at the foot of the cross — the Virgin, Mary Magdalene, Saint John — as vehicles for the empathetic response the Church increasingly required of devotional imagery.

The oil on canvas support allows for the large-scale figure handling and broad tonal contrasts that Crucifixion images require. Christ's pale body against the darkened sky provides the primary tonal drama, while the figures below are grouped in attitudes of grief that demonstrate Vasari's range of expressive gesture. His brushwork in such devotional commissions tends toward smooth, legible clarity.