The Three Crosses

Rubens painted The Three Crosses around 1620, a concentrated Crucifixion scene that belongs to the tradition of paired-thief imagery stretching from medieval art through Grünewald to the Baroque. Unlike his monumental Raising of the Cross and Descent from the Cross triptychs for Antwerp Cathedral, painted in the preceding decade and representing some of the grandest public altarpieces of the age, this smaller panel has the character of a devotional work for private contemplation. The theological contrast between the penitent thief (who receives salvation through faith and confession) and the impenitent thief (who dies in defiance) was an important Counter-Reformation theme, contrasting Protestant reliance on faith alone with Catholic sacramental theology. Rubens's dramatic chiaroscuro — the stormy sky, the concentrated light on Christ's body — draws on his study of Caravaggio, whom he had encountered in Rome and whose influence he processed more thoroughly than almost any northern European painter. By 1620, he had transmuted this influence into a fully personal Baroque idiom, retaining the dramatic lighting while rejecting Caravaggio's low-life figural types in favor of the idealized heroic bodies of his own mature style.

Rubens employs dramatic chiaroscuro to isolate the central cross in a shaft of light, while the flanking figures create a rhythmic composition that draws the viewer's eye upward through the picture plane.