Crucifixion

Crucifixion by Andrea Solari, dated 1503 and now in the Louvre, was painted during a period when Solari was working in France for the French governor of Milan, Charles II d'Amboise — the same patron for whom he painted the famous portrait now in the Louvre. Solari's presence in France in the early sixteenth century made him among the first Italian artists to bring Leonardesque influence directly to the French court, anticipating Leonardo's own arrival in France in 1516. A Crucifixion for a French patron in this context would have combined the Lombard emotional intensity appropriate to Passion devotion with the sophisticated Leonardesque sfumato modeling Solari had mastered.

Oil on panel with Solari's mature sfumato technique applied to the central devotional subject — Christ on the cross rendered with the soft tonal modeling he had learned from Leonardo, the landscape background using the atmospheric perspective that gives Leonardesque distance its characteristic misty depth. The Louvre's version is one of his most important surviving religious works.