The Descent from the Cross

Entry

The four Gospels give accounts of Christ's descent from the cross: Matthew 27:57-59, Mark 15:42-46, Luke 23:50-53 and John 19:38-39.² All identify Joseph of Arimathaea, ‘an honourable counsellor’ and ‘a good man and just’, as the believer who obtained Pilate’s permission to take down Christ’s body from the cross. According to St John, Joseph was accompanied by Nicodemus, who, like him, was a member of the council of Jews in Jerusalem. They were joined by those followers of Jesus who had been present at his crucifixion: the Virgin, and the three Maries: Mary Magdalen, Mary Cleophas, and Mary Salome. Gaspar de Crayer, in the Rijksmuseum Descent from the Cross, places John on the ladder and assigns to Joseph the central role of taking the main brunt of supporting Christ’s body. He introduced a youth carrying a basin, at the left, and an assistant to John, above.

In the gestures of the Virgin and St Mary Magdalen, De Crayer was here probably inspired by Peter Paul Rubens’s Descent from the Cross in Antwerp Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk of circa 1611-14.³ The Virgin is a weeping, standing spectator, thus following Franciscan exegesis, inspired by the John 19:26, which records that she was ‘standing by the cross’, and epitomized in the popular thirteenth-century poem Stabat Mater Dolorosa.⁴ Like Rubens, De Crayer places the main emphasis on Mary Magdalen, whose gesture ‘alludes to the sinful world reaching out to be saved by Christ’s sacrifice’.⁵ Rubens had also given John a similar role on the ladder in his altarpieces formerly at Kalisz⁶ and in St Petersburg (where the features are very similar);⁷ in the altarpiece at Valenciennes,⁸ he is seen on a lower rung and from the back.

In De Crayer’s only other extant depiction of the subject, his early altarpiece in the church of Saint-Martin at Millau,⁹ the pose of Christ depends on Rubens’s formulation in the altarpiece now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille¹⁰. The pose in the Rijksmuseum picture, however, does not appear to depend on Rubens; rather it refers back to that developed by Danielle da Volterra (1509-1566) in the Roman church of SS Trinità dei Monti, which was known to Rubens,¹¹ but which De Crayer could only have been aware of at second hand.

Vlieghe dates the Rijksmuseum picture to the decade after circa 1638. The composition is far more compact than that at Millau, nevertheless he used the same, untraced, drawing or modello for the youth on the left carrying the basin who is similarly placed in that composition. Also, the model for Nicodemus seems to have been similar. As Vlieghe pointed out, the model for Joseph of Arimathaea is identical to that of an executioner in the Martyrdom of St Blaise at Vlamertinge;¹² De Crayer would have used the same untraced drawing or modello for it. The model for the Virgin, as Vlieghe also pointed out, was the same for the St Monica in the Virgin and Child Venerated by Saints of 1646 in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich,¹³ though in the latter picture the figure faces left and her hair is adorned with pearls. The physiognomy of Christ as it here appears was often deployed by De Crayer from the 1640s: it makes an early appearance in the Miraculous Draught of Fishes in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels, which was finished in 1644.¹⁴ Several small pentiments in the museum painting can be detected by the naked eye.

For a discussion as to whether this Descent from the Cross and De Crayer’s Adoration of the Shepherds (SK-A-74) should be regarded as pendants and speculations about their function, see the entry on the latter.

A copy was acquired for the Jesuit Church in Auberg, Bavaria, in 1672.

Gregory Martin, 2022