Descent from the cross

Descent from the Cross, painted in 1911 and held at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Argentina, represents Ettore Tito working within the grandest tradition of Western religious painting — the deposition of Christ's body from the cross. The subject had occupied major painters from Rogier van der Weyden and Pontormo to Rubens and Caravaggio, and any Italian painter addressing it in 1911 did so in full consciousness of this overwhelming precedent. For Tito, whose reputation rested primarily on secular Venetian subjects, the choice of this subject was an assertion of range and ambition. The work's presence in Buenos Aires reflects the active collection-building of major South American museums in the early twentieth century, which brought significant Italian paintings to the southern hemisphere.

The deposition subject demands mastery of multiple simultaneous challenges: the weight of a limp body being lowered, the grief of surrounding figures, and the complex spatial arrangement of a group scene around a central figure. Tito's painterly handling would need to serve both the dramatic chiaroscuro traditionally associated with the subject and his own more luminous Venetian coloristic instincts.