page_title: Crucifixion (Titian)
section_title: The saints
hierarchical_section_title: Crucifixion (Titian) / The saints
caption_attribution_description: English: Crucifixion. Coloured flecks.detail
context_page_description: The Crucifixion is a life sized painting by the Venetian artist Titian, completed in 1558 and presently hanging in the sanctuary of the church of San Domenico, Ancona. Jesus Christ is shown crucified, with Saint Mary and Saint John standing either side of the cross in the Stabat Mater tradition. The kneeling figure is of Saint Dominic. The canvas was completed during Titian's fifth decade of painting, and is one of the works marking a shift toward his extensive exploration of tragedy and human suffering.
context_section_description: The figures Saint Mary and Saint Dominic appear in mostly dark raiment, again with striking highlights. Saint Mary stands in the indistinct and nearly blacked out bottom left corner of the canvas, but as her form rises, the dark blues of her mantle are given firm outline against the eerily glowing region to the rear. Her face is sunken and her eyes are flecked with spots of red, a theme that would be revisited centuries later by painters such as Antoine-Jean Gros (in The Plague at Jaffa) and the colourist Eugène Delacroix (in The Massacre at Chios, and others).
  St Dominic seizes and clings to the cross in a gesture wrought almost entirely out of sweeps of flashing light. The upward reaching curves of this figure—culminating in the manneristically long fingers—contrast with its crestfallen gaze, comprising an image of appalling sadness and pain. The hand on the foreshortened left arm of the figure of Saint John is once again the object of an exercise in contrast, the dark fingers being delineated by traces of white light. Saint John's revelationary stance is one of the motors of the painting, he being the only figure looking up in the direction of the broken Christ, and his awed gesture enjoining the viewer to contemplate the same.
caption: Detail, white flecks.
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