"Christ Falling on the Way to Calvary"

This piece was created during the Italian High Renaissance.  This masterpiece is an essential work for the development of Raphael’s style and reputation. It shows the common subject of Christ Carrying the Cross to his crucifixion, at the moment when he fell, and his mother suffers a spasm of agony, the Swoon of the Virgin, or “Lo Spasimo.” 

Simon of Cyrene, who is centered above Christ, is lifting Christ’s cross momentarily. The four Maries are depicted on the bottom right side of the painting. Towering on either side of the composition are the Roman guards. All the painting’s emotion is densely crammed into the foreground. The background is similar to that of a stage set with distant groups of people and crosses. The man on the left in the foreground is similar to a reversed figure in Raphael’s painting “The Judgement of Solomon” in the Raphael Rooms in the Vatican Palace.

Jesus is the main subject of the painting as it highlights the moment he slipped with the cross on his way to Golgotha for his crucifixion. In the image, there is a precise diagonal composition that converges to Christ.

The story of Christ Carrying the Cross on his way to his crucifixion is in all four Gospels. The story became a common subject in art, especially in the Catholic tradition of the “Stations of the Cross.” The “Stations of the Cross” are a series of images depicting Jesus Christ on the day of his crucifixion, which can be found in most Catholic churches. The Gospel of John explicitly states Jesus carried his cross, and all but John include Simon of Cyrene, who was recruited by the soldiers from the crowd to help carry the cross.

Only the Gospel of Luke mentions the “women of Jerusalem,” who were in later writings and Christian art assumed to include the Virgin Mary and the Three Marys. The Gospels give the name Mary to several women. At various points in Christian history, some of these women have been conflated with one another.

In Italian art, the Carrying of the Cross was usually relegated to a predictable, where the compositional framework inevitably had a horizontal orientation. Because of the increased importance of the subject and the painting’s function as an altarpiece, Raphael constructed the composition vertically, departing from the traditional rendering. Christ is portrayed pausing as he moves out of the pictorial space to the left; the path he will soon take can be seen bending back into the picture, finally leading to the hill where two crosses are already set up in the central distance