The Descent from the Cross
Rogier van der Weyden (about 1399 to 1464) · before 1443
Ten nearly life-size figures are crowded into a shallow gilded box like a carved altarpiece, and every one of them is weeping. The dead Christ is lowered from the cross by an old man on a ladder, and his body sags in a long diagonal. Beneath him the Virgin Mary faints, and her body falls in exactly the same curve, so that the mother's grief mirrors the son's death. Saint John in red bends to catch her, the Magdalene at the right wrings her hands, Joseph of Arimathea in gold brocade holds the body, and Nicodemus behind him looks out with a face of stunned sorrow. Tears run down cheeks and hang from chins, each painted as a bead of light.
Rogier van der Weyden painted this for the chapel of the archers' guild of Leuven, which is why tiny crossbows hang in the corners of the tracery. Look at the textures: fur, brocade, transparent veils, the gilded belt of Joseph, the pale skin over the dead ribs. Oil paint was new in the north, and Rogier used it to make everything real and yet to arrange it with the strictness of sculpture, so that the figures fill the box without any space behind them. The emotion is shown not through faces alone but through hands, which in this painting do half the talking.
Mary of Hungary, sister of the Emperor Charles the Fifth and governor of the Netherlands, acquired it for her castle near Brussels, and it passed to her nephew Philip the Second of Spain, who sent it to the Escorial in 1574. It came to the Prado in 1939. Copies were made almost from the moment it was finished, and for a hundred years it was the most influential painting in northern Europe. Notice the skull and bone in the lower corner, Adam's, on the hill of Golgotha.
Did You Know? The small crossbows in the corners of the painted tracery are the emblem of the Leuven archers who paid for the altarpiece.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.