Crucifix

Abstract

This painted wood crucifix, currently housed in the Museo Civico in Rieti, was first made for the Church of Santa Lucia in the same city, then to the Chiesa della Misericordia, and then its current position. The museum declines to make an attribution (unknown Umbrian or Abruzzese artist), but Sara Cavatorti, the expert on the Northern artist active in this region of Italy during this period known as Giovanni Teutonico, attributes the sculpture to Giovanni or his workshop, suggesting a date of early sixteenth century. Certainly the lean but muscular figure, whose bosy is criss-crossed with veins, with a delicately folded x-shaped loincloth, curling hair, and abundant sculpted blood from multiple wounds, including one in the left ear, echoes works by Giovanni Teutonico. The mouth is open and likely originally had a hinged tongue that could be moved up and down in ritual reenactments of the Crucifixion, but no tongue is now visible. The veins were made by laying blue strings in the gesso, before painting the flesh -- they are raised, and the cool tone shows through the translucent flesh, creating a very realistic effect, except that the placement of the veins is more decorative than realistic, not following the actual anatomy of the circulatory system. The abundant blood seems sculpted in the gesso before painting and unusually falls also a bit on the loincloth, which is usually unstained by Christ's blood. The blood runs in thick clots down from the wound in the side, reemerging on Christ's leg below the loincloth, in great rope-like clots from the wounds in the hands and feet, and on the forehead and ear, from a no longer extant crown of thorns. The work must have been made before 1528, when a document records the repainting of the cross (which no longer survives) and the addition of a new crown and nails to the crucifix, a form of devotional maintenance that would have been repeatedly performed over the centuries. When these photographs were taken in July 2025, pieces of paper had been applied to various places on the crucifix, probably as a stopgap conservation measure to stabilize areas of the painted surface that were not adhering well to the substrate. Photograph(s) licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.