The Crucifixion

This early Crucifixion from 1424 is among Giovanni di Paolo's earliest known works, painted when the artist was in his early twenties and still developing his distinctive style. The Crucifixion was a fundamental subject for any Sienese painter, and this work shows the young artist engaging with the city's rich tradition of devotional imagery. Characteristic of the artist's mature approach, the work displays brilliant, jewel-like color, gold grounds, lyrical figure types of Gothic grace, perspectival experiments that create strange compressed spaces, intense narrative invention.

The early panel reveals the formative influence of older Sienese masters in its composition and gold ground, with nascent signs of the expressive distortion that would become Giovanni di Paolo's hallmark.