Christ on the Cross with Mary Magdalene

Follower of Simon Vouet · c. 1645

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

74.4 × 55.6 cm (29 5/16 × 21 7/8 in.); Framed: 101.3 × 86.7 cm (39 7/8 × 34 1/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Baroque

This devotional canvas draws the viewer into an intimate moment of grief, its warm chiaroscuro pulling the eye from the shadowed cross down to Mary Magdalene's upturned, tear-streaked face. Simon Vouet spent over a decade in Rome before returning to Paris in 1627, where he became the dominant force in French Baroque painting and trained an entire generation of artists. His workshop absorbed the Italian taste for theatrical lighting and emotionally charged figuration, and this composition reflects that inheritance clearly — the figures are monumental yet tender, the palette rich with the deep crimsons and earthy ochres that characterise the Vouet circle. Works attributed to followers of Vouet show how thoroughly he transmitted his method, with pupils and associates producing canvases that shared his vocabulary of gesture, drapery, and light. The painting has been in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, where it represents the reach of French Baroque devotional art into the mid-seventeenth century. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on linen canvas using traditional layering techniques, allowing the subtle depth of the original's shadows and the luminosity of its flesh tones to come through with the same quiet gravity that has made this image endure.