(piano playing) Steven: We're in the
Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and we're looking at a
Rogier van der Weyden, one of the great Flemish
artists of the 15th century. This is his crucifixion. Beth: It's divided into three
parts that are connected by hinges. But it didn't always look this way. Steven: It was originally one large panel. Somebody later cut it into
three parts, put a hinge on it, but what's so interesting is
that Rogier van der Weyden had originally conceived
of this as a triptych. That is to say, he created a painting
that made it look like it was a triptych. Beth: And you can still see
the frame on what is today the right and left panels, the
frame that is that he painted. Steven: So it was an
illusion of the thing that it has now become. (laughs) Beth: That's true. (laughs) It's quite complicated. Steven: So let's look at the image itself. The large central panel has
Christ on the cross in the center. He's being mourned by the
Virgin Mary at his feet. John the Evangelist is
coming to comfort her. The two figures on the right
would have been the patrons of Rogier van der Weyden. These are the people who paid the
artist to make the painting, the donors. Beth: Interestingly the artist
included them within the space of the crucifixion,
right near Mary and John. Something that was really an innovation. Steven: So there's kind of
an incredible intimacy here. They are present, they are watching. Actually they're not quite present. The artist has separated them only
by that small fissure in the earth. Beth: And so they would have seen
themselves at the crucifixion. In that way, paintings like
this were aids in prayer so that you could move from the
painting to your own mental image of the crucifixion and imagine
what this moment was like for Mary, for Christ, for St. John. Steven: In an interior sense and in
fact if we look at the male donor, he seems to be looking
at the scene itself, whereas the female patron seems to be
having that kind of interior conversation that you were speaking of. So characteristic of the northern
tradition is this intense focus on the particular, on a
kind of careful rendering, a kind of clarified vision. And look at the heavenly city
of Jerusalem in the background. Now this might look like a
contemporary northern city, and it kind of does, I think van der
Weyden was more looking out his window than looking at Jerusalem. Beth: Or sort of using
that as the inspiration. Steven: But nevertheless, it is
meant to be the heavenly Jerusalem. And you can see the way he delights
in the kind of architectural detail, you can see some Gothic lancet
windows and just a bustling city. Beth: And that clarity
is in the background but it's also in the foreground. We see it in the fluttering
loincloth that Christ wears. That unrealistically loops up and back
and around sort of framing his body. Or we could look down at the
careful rendering of the ruffles around Mary's face. Or in the fur worn by the donors
around their cuffs and collars. Steven: When you mentioned the cloth
that wraps around Christ's waist, it does remind us that we've
left the physical world and we're looking at the
spiritual world above. And that kind of arabesque
will become a motif in later northern painting. On the two side wings, we have
two other important Saints. Mary Magdalene on the left
and Veronica on the right. Beth: Mary Magdalene is holding a
jar and that's the jar of ointment with which she anointed Christ's feet. And on the right we see Veronica
whose cloth wiped Christ's face while he was carrying
the cross and whose image miraculously appeared on that cloth. She holds it so delicately,
like it's such a very fragile but precious object and in
the way that she holds it and the way she tilts her
head, and also if we look at Mary Magdalene who wipes
the tears from her eyes with her cloak, we see something
that is very characteristic of Rogier van der Weyden and
that is an interest in emotions. Steven: That sense of emotion
can be seen in the angels above, but it can also be seen so
vividly in the Virgin Mary's face and St. John's face. There's an intensity of the trauma of
this torture that they've witnessed. Beth: Look at Mary. This looks like a woman
who's been crying for hours. Her face is pale and red, her
eyes are mostly closed and puffy, and the way that she lifts up
her arms and embraces the cross so desperately as the blood
drips down from Christ's feet and she presses her cheek against it. Steven: Veronica is so interesting to me because she holds that cloth,
that true image of Christ. Her name, Veronica, means "true
image," and so it's a perfect kind of a lighting. Beth: And she holds up an image
of Christ that looks miraculously very real and it's miraculous,
to me, what Rogier van der Weyden has been able to achieve on this triptych. (piano playing)