The Crucifixion

Taddeo di Bartolo · 1401–04

Medium

Tempera on panel

Original size

Panel: 37.6 × 72.4 cm (14 3/4 × 28 1/2 in.); Framed: 43.2 × 78.7 cm (17 × 31 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Italian Renaissance

Taddeo di Bartolo's *The Crucifixion* is a work of intense devotional gravity, its gold-ground surface radiating the otherworldly light characteristic of Sienese panel painting at its height. Di Bartolo was one of the leading painters of late-medieval Siena, working in the tradition of Duccio and the Lorenzetti brothers while absorbing the more expressive emotional currents flowing through Tuscany around 1400. His figures occupy a compressed, hieratic space where grief is rendered with remarkable directness — the mourning figures beneath the cross are not stylised abstractions but people in genuine anguish. His use of tempera on panel, built up through careful layered application over a gessoed ground, gives the colours a luminous clarity that has survived more than six centuries. The painting formed part of a polyptych altarpiece, a common format for Sienese devotional commissions, meaning it was always intended to be experienced within a larger visual programme of sacred imagery. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Di Bartolo's devotional intensity into a medium suited to contemporary walls, preserving the compositional authority of the original while bringing the figures and gold-leaf atmosphere to life with the depth that only a trained artist working in oils can achieve.