How 20th-century artists rescued the Crucifixion

Two millennia ago, in the outer reaches of the empire, the Romans performed a routine execution of a Galilean rebel. Tortured and publicly humiliated in front of family and friends, Jesus of Nazareth was slowly asphyxiated over six hours.

The Crucifixion is the centrepiece of Christianity. But artists have long adapted the devotional image of the Cross for their own purposes. As far back as the early 5th century, woodcarvers working on a door for the Basilica of Santa Sabina in Rome crafted a Christ whose palms are impaled with nails, but who is not hung on a cross. A devotional statue in Panama dating from the 17th century made Christ not Middle Eastern, but black African. James Tissot (c. 1890) and Salvador Dali (in 1951) radically altered our sense of the scene by treating it from the divine perspective.

Yet from the mid-20th century onwards the Crucifixion became a vehicle for artists of great faith and none to get visceral and political. In contrast to the classic depictions from the Spanish Golden Age by Alonso Cano (c. 1635) and Diego Velazquez (c. 1632), these artists reclaimed the Crucifixion for what it was — a repulsive spectacle and a raw human image.

One of the most outrageous reworkings is by a Catholic — the American artist Andres Serrano, whose ‘Immersion, Piss Christ’ (1987) is a photograph of a crucifix dunked in a jar of the artist’s concentrated urine. Thinking ‘Piss Christ’ sacrilegious, believers in the United States protested — and completely missed the point. After centuries of sanitised portrayals of a galling public execution, it took Serrano to resurrect the ignominy of Golgotha.

Serrano’s piece places us, the viewers, in the position of the witnesses — Joseph of Arimathea, the Marys and the rest who watched as nails were beaten into their friend’s flesh, heard the taunts of the thief beside him, and had no idea this was not the end.