Crucifixion 

An exciting and rare gold-ground painting on panel dating from circa 1350, the Rasini Crucifixion, a work that gave its artist his name, represents a key moment in northern Italian painting.  This pivotal point in the 14th century, in artistic terms, is filled with both the vast legacy of Giotto’s work in Padua and influences of the extreme naturalism of those Giottesque painters. The present work stands squarely in this singularly important period, showing both Giottesque-Lombard stylistic traits and influences from Verona. Keith Christianson writes, ‘I am among those who consider it a foundational painting for the great chapter of Giottesque painting that is inaugurated in Milan by Giotto and then reinforced by the presence of other great Florentines active in the church of San Gottardo and the abbeys of Chiaravalle and Vibaldone.’ He continues, ‘I am fascinated by the way…[the artist]…shifts emphasis from the dramatic groups of female mourners to one side of the cross and the group of male spectators/mockers to the other side—all treated in a distinctly “pictorial” style—and the noble figure of Christ, who has the weighty, physical presence of a piece of sculpture by Bonino Campione…Perhaps not so surprising when one considers how the figures occupy a space that seems to have been excavated from the rocks. Or the pointed contrast between the green tree and the red Roman flag. Everything in this foundational picture attests to an artist of extraordinary gifts.’

The painter of the Crucifixion is a product of that decisive moment, of the mutual influences and exchanges which the above lines imply and which explain, in part at least, the difficulty in finding a single, comprehensive key for interpreting his figurative style. Scholars including Sonia Chiodo and Miklós Boskovitz have identified the so-called Master of the Rasini Crucifixion with Altichiero da Zevio, who was born in Verona but whose cultural roots were in the Po Valley. Boskovits compared details of this painting with similar scenes from Altichiero’s famous fresco in the Oratorio di San Giorgio, Padua. The connection is not coincidental as Padua is also the site of one of Giotto’s most celebrated fresco cycles, that of the Scrovegni Chapel completed in 1305.

Christ’s crucifixion is set in a rocky landscape in which the figures move in a narrow space occupied on the right by Christ and the Pious Women and on the left by Roman soldiers. The scene is agitated and each character’s role is clearly defined. The Virgin faints in the arms of three Pious Women, who struggle to support the weight of the grieving mother, while Mary Magdalen kneels at the foot of the cross, her arms outstretched to collect Christ’s blood. On the other side, on Christ’s left, we see a crowd of soldiers, with one emerging in the foreground. The tormenter shown from behind in what is a unique and extraordinarily effective compositional device. He is a lout, brutal in his bulk and graceless in his movements as he turns his back on the observer and raises towards Christ’s face a stick on the end of which sits a sponge soaked in the vinegar he carries in a bucket held in his left hand. And finally, the scene is dominated by the figure of Christ in the empty space defined by sloping rocks on either side, his diaphanous body stained with the blood flowing copiously from the wound in his side and from the holes where his hands and feet have been pierced by large nails.

The Rasini Crucifixion was probably the central piece of a small painted panel intended for private devotion which included either closing wings or fixed side pieces. The wood has been cut along the edges (eliminating the pinnacle), pared down and glued to horizontal and vertical crosspieces (“parqueted”) to contain the movement of the wood. This means that it is now impossible to identify any trace of the elements that once linked it to its side pieces. Thus in a seemingly small space, the story of Christ’s crucifixion takes on the mood of an intensely poetic narrative in which every detail, far from being included by chance, is a deliberate part of a pattern revealing the painter’s intention to imbue his images with the profound significance of this event.

This work was first shown in 1937 at an exhibition of Giotto’s work in Florence, curated by Giulia Brunetti and Giulia Sinibaldi. The select catalogue published to tie in with the exhibition lists the painting as a work of the “school of Giotto”, specifying that the curators’ attention had been drawn to it by Antonio Morassi6. In the extended version of the catalogue, published by the same authors in 1943, the attribution has become more specific, mentioning a Giottesque painter from northern Italy and recording the hypotheses formulated in a number of reviews of the exhibition. The painting attracted the attention, in particular, of Luigi Coletti, Wilhelm Suida and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, in whose opinions we already find all the themes around which the subsequent critical debate was to revolve. Suida in fact detected a link with Giottesque culture in Padua; Coletti was the first to point to a link with Veronese circles and, in particular, with the figure of Altichiero da Zevio; while Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti was the first to identify a close affinity with a Crucifixion dated 1351 that entered the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1938. From that moment, the two paintings’ connection has not been seriously questioned, thus indissolubly linking the critical fate of both (fig. 1; 38.25).