The Descent from the Cross

This Descent from the Cross at Madrid’s Lázaro Galdiano Museum dates to 1524, the last year of Metsys’s life. The subject’s emotional intensity—the physical weight of Christ’s dead body being lowered from the cross—challenged painters to combine anatomical precision with devotional pathos. Metsys would have known Rogier van der Weyden’s supreme treatment of the subject, now in the Prado, and this late work engages with that tradition. Metsys's religious paintings combine the Flemish tradition of meticulous naturalism with compositional ideas absorbed from Italian Renaissance models.

The composition emphasizes the physical labor of lowering the body, with figures straining under its weight. Metsys’s late style shows a broader, more monumental approach to drapery than his earlier meticulous manner.