Christ Carrying the Cross

In Christ Carrying the Cross, Sebastiano del Piombo drew upon recent popular depictions of the same biblical episode by other artists, including Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, and Andrea Mantegna. Sebastiano heightened the scene’s visual impact by using the powerful diagonals of the cross to organize the painting. On the left side of the canvas, Simon of Cyrene assists Jesus by helping him lift the cross, a gesture that emphasizes its heavy weight. A Roman soldier stands behind them, his jeering face emerging from darkness. In the background to the right, the tightly packed composition opens up onto a distant scene of a crowd assembling at the foot of the hill of Golgotha, where Jesus will be crucified, with two crosses barely visible to the right of the trees, awaiting the two unnamed thieves who were crucified alongside Christ. The central figure’s expression is full of pathos, and even the sculptural folds of his clothing contribute to the sense of drama.

In the 1510s, following an early period in Venice, Sebastiano traveled to Rome, where he was drawn into the lively atmosphere of competition between Michelangelo and Raphael. Michelangelo took Sebastiano under his wing, teaching him his monumental style and providing drawings for some of Sebastiano’s major commissions. Christ Carrying the Cross was one of Sebastiano’s most popular paintings during his own lifetime, a fact reflected in the number of surviving variants that he created over the course of his career. The Art Institute’s version is an autograph replica of a painting—now in the Museo del Prado, Madrid—made for Jerónimo Vich y Valterra, the Spanish ambassador to Rome. Other versions survive in the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg; the Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales, Madrid; and the Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest.