Titian Vecellio (1490–1576) was among the leading painters of Venice and a prolific creator of religious imagery throughout the 1500s. Titian’s composition offers us an intimate view of a particular moment within the Gospel accounts of Christ’s way to Calvary. Titian framed the scene as a close-up view of Christ stumbling under the weight of the cross. Struggling to pick himself back up, he looks over his shoulder to see Simon of Cyrene arriving to assist in lifting the cross off his shoulders (Luke 23:26).

No other details of the setting, nor the other crowds of figures mentioned in Luke’s narrative, intervene. This helps direct the viewer’s contemplation to focus only on Christ’s physical struggle and his empathetic encounter with Simon.

Titian painted a number of pictures showing Christ on the Way to Calvary. This one, dated to about 1560, comes from the end of the aged Venetian painter’s career when his style became characterized by loose and open brushwork. It is a technique that does not disguise but rather testifies to the artist’s physical activity of applying oil pigment, roughly, to the canvas. We see this most emphatically in the treatment of Christ’s robes, where thick strokes of paint articulate the garment’s undulating wrinkles and folds. In the lower right that same garment all but dissolves into almost abstract and autonomous networks of worked paint. 

This approach to painting was condemned by some Italian Renaissance critics—Giorgio Vasari prominent among them—for its supposed lack of finish. Vasari accused the artist of failing to bring his works to a proper state of completion.

But, in a way that is typical of Titian’s late style, this manner of painting imparts the artist’s subjectivity—fashioned not through the detached and rote rehearsal of a standard subject, but through a spontaneity that records the moment of its very making. This makes this work far more than a studied representation of a biblical event. And knowing the artist’s heartfelt expression of piety in the religious imagery he made in the last two decades of his life, we may see here evidence of Titian’s own personal faith.

In so personalizing Christ on the Way to Calvary, Titian invites viewers, too, to share his devotion: to find in themselves the same humility, empathy, and compassion that we see Simon of Cyrene directing towards Christ in his most vulnerable state.