Christ Carrying the Cross

The procession reduced

The road to Calvary is by nature a crowd scene: soldiers, the two thieves, the women of Jerusalem, the crowd that followed. From it painting extracted a second, quieter type in which the crowd is cut away and only a bust-length figure and part of the beam remain. The episode is the same; the picture is no longer an account of what happened but an object for prayer, and the recorded size usually tells you which of the two a given entry is.

Position in the cycle

Between the judgement and the Crucifixion, the last Passion scene in motion. Of the ten works in this catalogue whose title names the carrying of the cross, the recorded dimensions range from small close-framed panels to canvases at altar scale, which is the range of that division.

The record

The catalogue names Lorenzo Lotto, dates the work to 1526, and gives the Louvre in Paris. The dimensions are 66 by 60 centimetres — nearly square and well under life size, the measurements of the close-framed variety rather than the processional one. The style is entered as High Renaissance and the artist as Italian; the subject fields class the work as religious. The measured palette reads as brown. The catalogue holds nine works by Lotto and fifteen works held in the Louvre.