Christ Carrying the Cross

The road out of the city

The carrying of the cross covers the distance between the praetorium and the place of execution. Three of the gospels name Simon of Cyrene, pressed into carrying the beam; John has Christ carry it himself, and painting chose between the two versions. The stations that later devotion counted along this road — the falls, the meeting with the mother, the woman with the cloth — come from tradition, not from the text.

Where it sits in the sequence

After the mocking and before the crucifixion, which is to say inside the last hour or two. It is the only episode of the Passion that is a journey, and cycles use it as the passage between the closed rooms of the trials and the open hill of the execution.

What the record gives

The catalogue names Matthias Grunewald, dates the work to 1524, and places it in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany. It measures 193 x 151 cm, upright and large — a picture for a wall rather than a hand. The style is entered as Northern Renaissance and the artist as German; the subject fields class the work as a group composition and as religious. The measured palette reads as ochre. No commission, altar or earlier owner is recorded, and none is added here.