THROUGHOUT history, artists have found in the Easter story everything they might want. After all, it contains not only spirituality and, in the resurrection of Christ, the greatest of all miracles, but human emotion at its highest pitch and the body—scourged, crucified and resurrected—at both its most abject and most transcendent. From the first depiction of the Crucifixion in the 2nd century AD, the events surrounding Christ’s death have been a life-giving force in art.
The profundity of the Easter narrative has also pushed painters and sculptors to make some of their best work. Michelangelo was so proud of his (1498–99) in St Peter’s that, when he heard an onlooker ascribing it to another sculptor, he brought a chisel and hammer back to the basilica and carved his name into it; it is the only work that bears his signature. Giotto’s fresco showing the (1304–06) in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua remains a heart-stopping psychological moment seven centuries after it was painted. Even Salvador Dalí dropped his, in 1951.
