Christ Carrying The Cross

The road to Calvary

The episode is the walk from the sentence to the place of execution. The synoptic gospels bring in Simon of Cyrene, pressed from the crowd to carry the cross; John gives the sentence differently and has Christ bear it himself. Painters had to choose between the two accounts, and the choice is visible in whether a second man is present at the beam.

Where it sits

Between the judgement before Pilate and the Crucifixion. Ten titles in this catalogue name the carrying of the cross, which makes it one of the most repeated single episodes here — the road is the last scene in the Passion that still has movement in it, and it is the only one that puts Christ inside a crowd on open ground.

The record

The catalogue names Jan van Hemessen, dates the work to 1553, and gives the Christian Museum in Esztergom, Hungary, as the location. It measures 111 by 97.5 centimetres, an upright at about half the height of the largest treatment of this subject in the catalogue and nearly three times the area of the smallest. The style is entered as Northern Renaissance and the artist as Flemish; the subject fields class the work as religious. The measured palette reads as red.