Crucifixion

Van Dyck came back from Italy and painted the Crucifixion again, this time with the cross set at a slant and a storm-dark sky behind it. It has hung in Lille since the museum was founded.

The story behind the painting

Van Dyck painted this Crucifixion around 1630 as the high altarpiece for the convent of the Récollets in Lille, during his second Antwerp period, between his return from Italy in 1627 and his move to London in 1632. He had already treated the subject around 1617 to 1619, while still an assistant to Rubens, in a Crucifixion with the Virgin, Saint John and Mary Magdalene now in the Louvre. The new altarpiece let him return to a familiar theme with fresh experience.

What to look for

This second version is more original: the cross is not central but set at an oblique angle to give the scene depth. Look at the three mourners and their colours, golden yellow for Mary Magdalene, red for John, blue for the Virgin. A fourth shadowed figure at the far right is uncertain, perhaps one of the Three Marys. At the foot of the cross, lower left, Adam's skull lies under a thistle. The stormy sky and the Magdalene's hair show what Van Dyck learned from the Venetian masters in Italy.

Meaning and intent

The colours are symbolic: the Magdalene's yellow for eternal light, John's red for the Passion, the Virgin's blue for the mantle of humanity. Golgotha means the place of the skull, so Adam's skull recalls the Fall and Original Sin, and the thistle's spines echo Christ's crown of thorns. In the semicircle above the cross is a mystic delta, a symbol of the Holy Trinity. Every element at the foot of the cross thus points back to the story of sin and redemption that the altarpiece was meant to place before the friars.

Legacy

The painting was seized during the French Revolution, and in 1795 it became part of the founding collection of the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille, where it still hangs. The sources disagree on its size: Wikipedia gives a height of 2.51 m, while Wikidata lists 109 by 124 cm. The earlier version, painted while he worked with Rubens, was sold to Rubens in 1621 as the high altarpiece of the Jesuit church at the abbey of Saint-Winnoc in Bergues and is now in the Louvre, so both treatments survive in French museums.