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Within the Museum's collection this painting perhaps best represents the changes in style and technique which took place in painting in the first half of the fifteenth century in Southern Europe. At this date tempera painting was gradually abandoned in favour of the more promising oil painting, a technique imported from northern Europe and whose flexibility opened new possibilities of richer colours which could be combined in an almost unlimited range of graduations, making it easier to shade one colour into another and to mix tones. The figure of Antonello da Messina was essential to the arrival and dissemination of this revolutionary procedure. However, oil was taken up slowly in Italy and it is common to find paintings which use both oil and tempera even in the sixteenth century. In addition, the arrival of this new technique in Southern Europe was accompanied by the arrival of a new and expressive pictorial style and one which was different to that employed in Northern Italy.
The different attributions which this panel has borne, the technique employed and the manner of representing a traditional subject in Christian iconography, all reveal a web of artistic influences and relationships between North and South Europe which have yet to be fully understood. Since the painting was first brought to light by Post in the 1950s when it was in the collection of Charles Henschel in New York, it has been the subject of widely differing opinions as to its authorship. In 1952 Post attributed it, with some reserves, to the Spanish artist Luis Dalmau. Dalmau, who was painter to the court of Alfonso V of Aragon and who travelled to Flanders in 1431, knew Van Eyck's work at first hand. The Christ in this panel, which has been compared to the Christ in the panel by Van Eyck now in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie, certainly recalls Van Eyck. In 1955 Longhi and other art historians attributed the painting to Colantonio, observing that it combines Italian, Flemish and Catalan elements in a way which was only possible at that date if it was produced in Southern Italy. This thesis is reinforced by the similarities between some specific elements in the Thyssen painting and another early Crucifixion by Antonello da Messina (a pupil of Colantonio) now in Bucharest.
The current attribution was made by Boskovits, who considers it the work of an anonymous artist probably active in Naples. Boskovits admits similarities between this painting and some panels by Colantonio painted in Naples, but does not consider them sufficient to attribute this panel to him. In addition, he has drawn attention to the way in which the landscape is painted with its hard bare appearance and multiple planes opening out behind the cross, and has also emphasised the nervous, emotional and expressive style with which the gesturing figures are painted, at times bordering on caricature.
Mar Borobia
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