Christ Carrying the Cross

Martin Schongauer

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The largest and most painterly of his prints, Christ Carrying the Cross is Schongauer's masterpiece. This engraving depicting Christ's procession to Golgotha is the artist's most visually complex. He created a spectrum of tones from white to gray to black by altering the density of the hatching. Throughout the print, he masterfully offset light and dark areas: for example, he placed the fully shaded figures on the right against a landscape delineated only by outlines and did almost the reverse with the boy in the lower left, situated in front of an area of shadowed ground. Schongauer was inspired by a painting of the subject by Jan van Eyck, now lost and known only through copies, and similarly created an image packed with lively characterizations of exotic figures and incidental detail. Yet he pushed the entire procession to the foreground and, as in devotional icons, he turned Christ's head to confront the viewer, emphasizing man's identification with Christ's suffering.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art