descent from the Cross

Jan Sanders van Hemessen's Descent from the Cross brings his characteristic large-format figure style and psychological intensity to the most emotionally demanding moment of the Passion narrative. Van Hemessen was among the most technically ambitious of the mid-sixteenth-century Antwerp painters, developing a figure style notable for its sculptural solidity and expressive distortion of grief and effort. The physical labor of lowering Christ's body from the cross — the strain of the male figures, the anguish of the women below — is rendered with the frank corporeality that distinguished Van Hemessen's approach from the more elegant Mannerist style simultaneously popular in Antwerp.

The painting demonstrates the technical conventions and artistic vocabulary of the period, with attention to composition, color, and the rendering of form appropriate to the subject.