Pieter de Witte (Pietro Candido in Italian) occupies an unusual position in late sixteenth-century painting as a Flemish-born artist who spent the formative decades of his career in Florence under Vasari and then in Munich under Wilhelm V of Bavaria, where he remained as court painter. The Andata al Calvario — Christ carrying the Cross — is a subject that had acquired particular urgency in the Counter-Reformation period, when the physical suffering of Christ was emphasized in devotional practice and in painting as a corrective to Protestant de-emphasis of penitential imagery. De Witte’s oil on copper support places this work in the category of precious cabinet devotional objects, where copper’s non-absorbent surface allowed the smoothest possible execution and the deepest possible color saturation. His Florentine training gives the figures a Mannerist elegance, extended limbs, torsion, courtly refinement, that coexists uneasily with the violence of the subject.
