The Crucifixion

The Crucifixion by Cosimo Tura, dated around 1450 and formerly in the Cook Collection, belongs to the earliest phase of this Ferrarese master's career. Tura was the founding figure of the Ferrara school — a distinctive, intensely personal style marked by harsh, metallic drapery, distorted physiognomies, and a kind of visionary strangeness unlike anything produced in Florence or Venice simultaneously. Ferrara under the Este court was a center of humanist learning and courtly culture, and Tura served the Este as court painter from the 1450s onward. His early Crucifixion would have developed the emotionally charged treatment of Christ's suffering that would become a hallmark of Ferrarese painting.

Tempera on panel with the metallic precision and harsh angularity characteristic of Tura even in early works — drapery folding into sharp, almost crystalline edges, the body of the crucified Christ rendered with an intensity that transcends devotional convention toward something more visionary and disturbing.