Christ on the Cross

Christ on the Cross from around 1443 is one of several Crucifixion panels Giovanni di Paolo produced during his middle career, when he was the leading painter in Siena. The devotional Crucifixion image was a fundamental requirement of church furnishing and private worship throughout the Italian fifteenth century. 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 suffering Christ is depicted with the emotional intensity characteristic of Giovanni di Paolo's religious imagery, with expressive modeling of the body and face.