The Crowning with Thorns
Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) (c. 1488/1490-1576) · c. 1542-1543
Christ sits hunched on a step while four tormentors drive a crown of thorns onto his head with long wooden staves, levering down on him from every side. One presses a knee against his back. A soldier in a plumed helmet leans in from the left, another grips a stave overhead, and the whole group is compressed into a tight, violent knot beneath a rusticated stone archway. Above the arch a marble bust of the emperor Tiberius looks down with an inscription bearing his name, a cold reminder that this brutality is being carried out in the name of Roman authority.
Titian uses the staves as the structural skeleton of the picture, radiating like the spokes of a broken wheel and converging on the head of Christ. The bodies are built from a few enormous, heavily loaded brushstrokes, and the muscular exaggeration shows Titian absorbing Michelangelo and the Roman sculpture of the Laocoön, which he had recently studied. The colour scheme is deliberately harsh: raw reds, greenish flesh, flashes of steel, all set against the drab grey masonry. Stand close and you can see how loosely the armour is indicated, and how much of the modelling is done with the brush handle and the fingers rather than fine detail.
The panel was painted around 1542 for the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, home of Leonardo's Last Supper. It was taken to France after Napoleon's Italian campaign and entered the Louvre. Roughly thirty years later, in old age, Titian returned to exactly the same composition in a far more dissolved, smouldering version now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, so the two canvases together map his entire late transformation.
Did You Know? Titian painted the same composition twice, and comparing this hard-edged Milan version with the ghostly Munich one from around 1570 is the clearest demonstration anywhere of how radically his late style loosened.
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