Crucifixion

This small, painted crucifix is exceptional not only for its artistry, but also because it is signed by a woman artist: María Josefa Sánchez. Sánchez worked roughly from 1639 to 1649, probably in Castile, Spain, but little else is known about her. Women rarely worked as professional artists in seventeenth-century Spain, where laws and customs discouraged them from entering professions. Laws also prohibited women from serving as apprentices or signing official documents. The few women who became artists usually trained in their fathers’ workshops. Some women artists of the period, Sánchez included, might have been nuns who produced devotional works within monastic communities.

Sánchez depicted Jesus alive on the cross, an iconographic type known as Christus triumphans. His graceful pose contrasts with his agonized expression, and carefully rendered drops of blood spill from his hands and feet. The orbs near his hands represent the sun and moon, a reference to an eclipse at the moment of Christ’s death by crucifixion. At the foot of the cross, Jesus’s mother, Mary, portrayed as a young girl wearing white and blue robes, is crowned with stars and standing atop a crescent moon. These attributes identify her as the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, an atypical subject for a Crucifixion image.