Seeing Salvation - The Cross

Neil MacGregor's series on images of Christ looks at how even the seemingly unvarying image of Christ's cross has meant different things at different times and in different contexts. For the early Christians, it meant Christ's victory over death - there is no suffering, only triumph -shown in the earliest known narrative depiction of the Crucifixion on the tiny 5th-century Roman ivory plaques now in the British Museum. But in the new theology preached by Saints Dominic and Francis - illustrated in Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco in Florence and at the Sacro Monte in Varallo - Christ's sufferings are the measure of his love for us. In Grunewald's Crucifixion for the hospital at Isenheim (now in Colmar), Christ's gruesome injuries resemble those of the patients who suffered from the disfiguring disease then called Saint Anthony's Fire.