Christ Carrying the Cross

An episode in a confraternity's building

The subject is the road to Calvary. What the record adds is where the work is: the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice, which is not a museum and not a parish church but the seat of a lay confraternity — a brotherhood that commissioned and kept art for its own devotional use. A location field of that kind marks a picture that has stayed inside the institution it was made for.

Where the scene falls

Between the sentence and the Crucifixion, the final scene of the Passion that still moves. For a confraternity, whose devotions followed the Passion in order through the year, that position is the point of the picture: the road is the part of the story a procession can imitate.

The record

The catalogue gives Titian and 1507, with dimensions of 70 by 100 centimetres — a small horizontal, unusual for this subject, which is more often upright. The style is entered both as High Renaissance and as Mannerism and late Renaissance, and the artist as Italian; the subject fields class the work as a group composition and as religious. The measured palette reads as red. Nine works in this catalogue are attributed to Titian. The entry gives no commission and no date of installation.