Christ on the Way to Calvary

Duccio di Buoninsegna was the leading painter of the Italian city-state of Siena in the late 1200s and early 1300s. His portrayal of Christ’s journey to Calvary was one of several scenes from the Passion of Jesus that adorn the reverse of his most famous altarpiece, the Maestà, commissioned for the Cathedral of Siena. As part of a narrative sequence, Duccio designed the composition with ease of legibility as one of his foremost considerations. 

To this end, Duccio’s portrayal stays close to the more extensive description of this episode in Luke 23:26–32 (as compared with the other Gospels). Christ has already been relieved of his burden of carrying the cross by Simon of Cyrene, seen on the far right. Meanwhile, Christ glances backward toward the women grouped together on the left who mourn his impending death. Among the women is the Virgin Mary, identified by her blue garment and gilded halo. 

The addition of other elements stimulates the viewer’s anticipation of Christ’s later death. Gaunt and solemnly immobile, while prominent against the throngs following behind him, he is clad in red as though to foreground the blood that will be shed at his crucifixion. His hands, here bound at the wrists, are lowered—a posture which foreshadows the one he will soon assume when lying dead (albeit temporarily) in the sepulchre.

The style of this panel is consistent with late Gothic painting in Siena. It bears witness to the influence of gilded icons from Byzantium that made their way to Italy after the sack of Constantinople in 1204. These typically enriched their sacred subjects with rich material splendour—both in form of fields of gold leaf and also in the delicate tooling used to enliven the shimmer of halos.

In this particular example, the expansive gold leaf in the background conceals the fact that this event’s historical setting was an urban one. It removes the scene from the specificity of time and place. Further, it focuses the viewer’s attention on the crowds of figures packed together in the foreground. 

It is in these figures, and perhaps especially in the multitude of women wailing and lamenting Christ (Luke 23:27), that the viewer of this artwork finds his or her role. Not just as an outside spectator, but as a mournful participant from his or her own time and place of contemplation.  

This is one of the several contributions made by Jean de Wespin (Il Tabacchetti) and Giovanni d’Enrico in the late 1500s and early 1600s to the Sacro Monte di Varallo in Piedmont, Northern Italy. The ‘holy mountain’ is a pilgrimage site consisting of a series of small chapels featuring multi-media dioramas of sacred events. Visitors to the Sacro Monte have benefited for centuries from the immersive devotional experiences that they afford. 

This particular scene is among the most lavish of those at the site. It is composed of crowds of figures made in polychrome terracotta exhibiting animated gestures and postures. These painted sculptures have a naturalism rarely encountered in Italian Renaissance art. They are nearly life-size, and the artist has incorporated such elements as real hair and inlaid glass eyes to evoke a vivid and hyperrealistic presence verging on the hallucinatory for viewers who encounter this scene. 

The subjects featured at this site, and other sculpted sacri monti like it, usually adhere closely to the Gospel accounts of their respective stories. But especially prominent in this one is a famous episode which—though frequently portrayed by medieval and Renaissance artists—is not explicitly mentioned in any of the four Gospel accounts of Christ’s carrying the cross. This is the encounter with St Veronica, who presents Christ with a face cloth after he stumbles under the weight of the cross.

By introducing another character to the story of Christ’s way to Calvary, the Veronica legend offers additional ways for worshippers to enter into devotion to Christ’s Passion. One of those is through the object she holds in her hands. After being wiped, Christ’s face is said miraculously to have left its image adhering to the cloth. That image is here displayed by Veronica. The cloth, often called the Sudarium, the Veil of Veronica, or simply the Veronica, was believed to have been kept in Rome since the twelfth century where it became one of Christianity’s most holy and highly revered sacred relics.

Veronica, like Simon of Cyrene, embodies the compassionate onlooker. Both this apocryphal woman and this scripturally-attested man are followers of Christ and his sacrifice—emerging from the anonymity of the masses who press around the Saviour to become more intimately bound up in his story. Both provide examples after which viewers can model their own piety and empathy.

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 a close-up 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.