Christ Carrying the Cross tapestry

Christ Carrying the Cross tapestry , late 1500s

Where object was made: Germany or Switzerland

Material/technique: wool; weaving

Dimensions:
Object Height/Width (Height x Width): 54 x 55.9 cm
Object Height/Width (Height x Width): 21 1/4 x 22 in
Frame Dimensions (Height x Width x Depth): 25 x 25 1/2 x 2 in

Credit line: Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Franklin D. Murphy

Accession number: 1977.0009

Not on display

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Exhibition Label:
"Giorgio Vasari and Court Culture in Late Renaissance Italy," Sep-2012, Sally Cornelison and Susan Earle
This German textile fragment is a further example of the variety of media in which artists depicted Christ’s Passion. It was cut from a large, horizontal tapestry that divided eight Passion scenes into two registers, and which likely decorated the front of an altar. Scenes from the Passion of Christ were appropriate for an altar frontal, as they visually connected the pain and suffering of Christ’s last days and his death with the sacrament of the Eucharist, in which the bread-the body of Christ-was consecrated.
The woven image of Christ Carrying the Cross shares the drama and some of the compositional conventions as the sources for Vasari’s painting of the same subject. Like Raphael’s Lo Spasimo di Sicilia and copies of it, here the sorrowful Virgin Mary, and not St. Veronica, reaches out towards Christ, who trudges forward, rather than breaks his fall on a rock as in Schongauer’s and Dürer’s prints.