Antoon Van Dyck (1599 – 1641), Dying Christ, c.1620s, Oil on canvas, 124 x 93 cm, King’s bedroom, Palazzo Reale, Genoa
Van Dyck grew up in a deeply religious Catholic household. His father, Frans, a prosperous Antwerp silk merchant, served as president of the lay Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament. His brother Theodorus became a priest at Minderhout; his sisters Susanna, Cornelia and Isabella entered the béguinage, and a fourth sister, Anna, took vows as a nun. After his return from Italy in 1627, Van Dyck himself enrolled in the Jesuit-directed Confraternity of Bachelors, and in 1629 painted a large Crucifixion with St Dominic and St Catherine of Siena for the Dominican church in Antwerp as an epitaph for his recently deceased father . Faith ran through Van Dyck’s family like a binding thread, and it is difficult to look at any of his Passion subjects without sensing something very personal.
This painting, hung in the King’s Bedroom of the Palazzo Reale on the Via Balbi, is widely considered the only surviving autograph Crucifixion from Van Dyck’s Italian years. Nothing is known of its original commission or early provenance. It entered the palace only in 1833, having been purchased in 1821 by Carlo Felice of Sardinia from the collection of Carlo Andrea Gabaldoni. Its attribution has never been seriously challenged, and the date is placed around 1627, during or just after Van Dyck’s extended residence in Genoa.
Christ is shown still alive, his bloodied face tilted upward, mouth open in what reads unmistakably as the cry of dereliction recorded in Matthew 27:46: Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani? There is no Virgin, no Magdalene, no mourning disciples gathered at the foot of the cross. He is entirely alone. A harsh, cold light picks out the musculature of his body and catches the elaborate loincloth, which twists as though caught by wind, lending the scene a raw physicality that Van Dyck, under Rubens’s influence, knew how to exploit without tipping into spectacle. Above the thorn-crowned head, a faint luminous glow competes with the darkening sky: the solar eclipse described by Luke (23:44–45), where darkness fell over the land from the sixth to the ninth hour and the sun’s light failed. The barren, rocky ground beneath the cross offers no consolation, only an emptiness that deepens the sense of abandonment.
Van Dyck had been painting Crucifixion subjects since his late teens. Around 1617–19, while still assisting Rubens, he produced a Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John and Saint Mary Magdalene, later sold to Rubens himself in 1621 for the Jesuit church at Bergues, now in the Louvre. After returning from Italy, he revisited the theme repeatedly: for the Augustinian convent in Antwerp (a signed version dated 1627, now in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten), for the Récollets in Lille (c. 1630, now Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille), and in numerous smaller panels and oil sketches intended for private devotion (including one in Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza). Several of these smaller compositions deliberately strip the scene to its barest elements: Christ alone on the cross, without attendant figures, confronting loneliness during his agony. It is a formula Van Dyck clearly found inexhaustible, returning to it across decades, adjusting scale and format but never quite leaving the subject behind. One might ask whether any other seventeenth-century painter was so persistently drawn to the isolated, suffering Christ, or whether the motif held for Van Dyck a private, confessional meaning that went beyond Counter-Reformation convention.
The Genoa canvas is modest in size but not in effect. The foreshortened perspective pushes Christ’s body towards the viewer, a compositional device Van Dyck had absorbed from Rubens’s monumental altarpieces and from his own study of Venetian painting during the Italian years. His sketchbook, now in the British Museum, documents the intensity of his encounters with Titian and Veronese, and something of that Venetian warmth in the handling of flesh and fabric survives here, despite the bleakness of the subject . What separates this painting from Van Dyck’s later, more elaborated Crucifixion altarpieces is precisely its austerity. The absence of any secondary figures concentrates everything on the body and the face. There is no story being told around the edges, no weeping bystanders to direct the viewer’s sympathy. The viewer stands where Mary and John would have stood, and the painting offers no buffer.
Whether Van Dyck intended this as a private devotional work or as something for a chapel or bedchamber, we cannot know. Its modest scale and its arrival in Genoa through a collector’s purchase rather than a church commission suggest it may always have been a cabinet painting, meant for close, solitary looking. If so, the intimacy of the encounter was the point: one person, alone with the dying Christ, in a room not so different from the one where it now hangs.
References
Barnes, S.J., De Poorter, N., Millar, O. and Vey, H. (2004) Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings. New Haven and London: Yale University Press
Glen, T.L. (1983) ‘Observations on van Dyck as a Religious Painter’, RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review, 10(1), pp. 45–52. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42630976.(Accessed 1 October 2024)
Liedtke, W.A. (2003) ‘Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641): Paintings’, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/peter-paul-rubens-1577-1640-and-anthony-van-dyck-1599-1641-paintings.(Accessed 01 October 2024)
Martin, J. and Feigenbaum, G. (1979) Van Dyck as Religious Artist. Princeton: The Art Museum, Princeton University
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza (n.d.) Christ on the Cross – Dyck, Anthony van. Available at: https://www.museothyssen.org/en/collection/artists/dyck-anthony-van/christ-cross (Accessed: 1 October 2024)