Crucified Christ

The earliest of Fra Angelico’s mural paintings is the Crucified Christ in the Chapter House of San Domenico, the room where the friars, sometimes joined by the laity, assembled for meetings. To enhance its poignant realism, the artist foreshortened Christ’s lowered head and torso from the perspective of the kneeling worshipper. The slender, idealized body is anatomically detailed and luminously modelled. The inscriptions - in Hebrew, Greek and Latin - on the titulus of the cross identify Christ as ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.’