Christ On The Cross, Made Of Oak, Flanders early 16th Century

This large oak sculpture of Christ is carved in the round. His head is encircled by a crown of woven thorns, while his face—with half-closed eyes, a pinched nose, a slightly parted mouth, and a forked beard—expresses restrained pain. His arms and his body—stretched out, straight as an arrow—convey the artist’s vision of Christ’s resilience in the face of his painful fate. Far from the image of the corpus triumphant in the style of Michelangelo, or sublimated as in the works of della Porta or Giambologna, this Christ suffers and resists, offering a perspective radically different from contemporary Italian versions.