Greek Art: Christ Carrying The Cross

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Christ Carrying the Cross is a Greek painting created by El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) from the year 1577 to 1587, using oil on canvas. This work of art is currently on display in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. El Greco’s devotional portraits of holy figures offer clear indications that he perceived his paintings as visual instruments of spiritual ascent, through which he did not simply serve his patron’s longing for enlightenment, but he also wished for his own personal salvation by declaring his faith and invoking the intercession of the saints depicted. Ecstatic prayer and union with God, rather than the anguished suffering typical in the period, radiate from this masterpiece. Christ Carrying the Cross expresses one of the biggest …show more content…
The colors are also sober, although Christ’s mantle is crimson, a reminiscence of the Byzantine-Venetian chromatism. His grasp onto the cross is gentle and humble. The cross can be associated with the burden of religious discrimination, for instance being a Muslim in France after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, which strongly stigmatized the Muslim religion. As one can notice from the painting, Christ gently embraces the cross and carries it while being humble. He is not fierce about his inevitable death, which invites the viewers to accept their own fate in times of doubt. To reinforce this, he looks calm and composed as he accepts his destiny. So the dominant message in Christ Carrying the Cross is that the Savior appears to have already escaped the burdens of this world. The ground beneath him is cut away to suggest this while the cross itself is rendered weightlessly by androgynous hands that barely press upon it. The timber of the cross, which without notches or grain, lacks volume, weight and material …show more content…
It is a painting which is very easy to understand, very clear and helps to connect to its meaning. The halo-like glow around Jesus’s head suggests that he is to be idealized and is a significant figure, and his white clean hands suggest innocence. The drama of light-and dark contrasts, movement of pattern due to swirling bands of color, picturesque distortions in the drawing of the figure and in the rendering of space, absence of actual contour-lines, modeling by parallel band of light and dark, tendency to over accentuation of highlighted areas, and deficient internal illumination of color, are all typical features used by El Greco in this
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