The Crucifixion

The Crucifixion was the central image of Christian devotion in Counter-Reformation Europe, and Flemish painters produced the subject in formats ranging from monumental altarpieces to intimate cabinet pictures. Hendrick van Balen the Elder's version on canvas, held in the Nationalmuseum Stockholm, belongs to the devotional tradition of Antwerp Baroque painting in which the theological gravity of the subject was conveyed through careful attention to Christ's anatomy, the expressions of mourners, and the atmospheric handling of the sky. The Nationalmuseum acquired its Flemish holdings largely through seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Swedish royal and noble collecting, which swept up works by many Antwerp masters alongside the more celebrated names of Rubens and Jordaens. Van Balen's Crucifixion would have served either as an altarpiece component or as a private devotional work, its emotional restraint reflecting the refined sensibility of its original audience.

Canvas provides a ground for a looser touch than Van Balen typically used on panel or copper. The figure of Christ is modelled with careful anatomical attention, pale against the dramatic sky, with thinly painted flesh contrasting against the dark wood of the cross. The sky is worked in broken grey and ochre tones, suggesting the supernatural darkness that descended at the moment of Christ's death.