Crucified Christ

Entry

The most common images in late medieval art centre on Christ’s suffering and above all his death on the cross. In sculpture, this encompasses both multi-figured scenes, such as Crucifixion or Calvary groups with Christ, Mary and St John, but also solitary crucifixes, such as chancel and altar crosses. Diversity is also encountered in terms of the scale of these images, ranging from monumental triumphal crosses, hanging high up above the faithful in the chancel of a church, to crosses of minimal dimensions for personal devotion. This medium-sized Crucified Christ might originally have belonged to a small church or chapel, but it could also have been used in someone’s private chamber. At the time of its acquisition, it was affixed to a modern cross and had clearly been repainted (fig. a). Both the wooden cross and the repainting were removed, thus allowing the largely preserved, original polychromy and gilding to re-emerge.

On his head, Christ wears a thick crown of thorns. He is crucified with his arms widely extended and one foot placed over the other. He is broadfaced, with his moustache and beard finished in ornamental detail. At the time of its acquisition, Leeuwenberg had already established a connection between this corpus and several other examples in the eastern Netherlands, e.g. on the crucifixes in Haarle (Overijssel) and Keienburg (Gelderland).¹ On the basis of these related works, the present sculpture was long described as ‘eastern Nederlandish’.² Currently, however, it is seen as belonging to a large, widely dispersed group of crucifixes produced around 1500 in the Lower Rhine region in the sphere of Master Arnt of Kalkar (active c. 1460-d. 1492). The prototype for the present work is Arnt’s monumental crucifix in the Sankt-Nicolaikirche in Kalkar (fig. b).³ Attributed to that same master are a smaller version in the Museum het Valkhof in Nijmegen, known to have come from the cemetery chapel of Oud-Zevenaar and a similar sized crucifix in the Sankt-Pankratius in Dingden.⁴ Among the copies of these works is a chancel cross preserved in the aforementioned Sankt-Nicolaikirche, which can be attributed to the same hand as the present corpus.⁵ Another copy can be found in the Sankt-Clemens in Wissel.⁶ The provenance of the sculptures belonging to this group strongly indicates that the Amsterdam Christ was also produced in the area of Cleves in the Lower Rhine region.

Guido de Werd, 2004 (updated by Bieke van der Mark, 2024)
This entry was originally published in F. Scholten and G. de Werd, Een hogere werkelijkheid: Duitse en Franse beeldhouwkunst 1200-1600 uit het Rijksmuseum Amsterdam/Eine höhere Wirklichkeit, Deutsche und Französische Skulptur 1200-1600 aus dem Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, exh. cat. Cleves (Museum Kurhaus Kleve) 2004-06, no. 8