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by Tom Gurney Tom Gurney BSc (Hons) is an art history expert with over 20 years experience
Published on June 19, 2020 / Updated on September 28, 2026
Email: tomgurney1@gmail.com / Phone: +44 7429 011000
Degas Crucifixion After Mantegna: Introduction
Three crosses rise above a rocky landscape. Christ occupies the central cross, with two condemned men on either side. People gather below: some mourn, others stand, and figures in the right foreground seem absorbed in activity of their own. This is Edgar Degas's oil copy of Andrea Mantegna's Crucifixion, a work he studied in the Louvre. The copy belongs to the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours, inventory 1934-6-1, and is recorded in the French national collections database as Le Calvaire d'après Mantegna, dated 1861. [1][2][6]
“After Mantegna” is essential to the title. The image is Degas's interpretation of a fifteenth-century painting, neither an original biblical scene invented by Degas nor Mantegna's panel itself. The difference lets us see a young artist learning through copying and deciding how much of an older work to carry into his own brushwork. [1][2][3]
The work at a glance
ArtistEdgar Degas (1834–1917), after Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506)
Collection titleLe Calvaire d'après Mantegna
English titleThe Crucifixion after Mantegna
Date1861 in French national collection record; catalogue range 1861–64
The central cross provides a strong vertical line against the horizontal landscape. The two other crosses spread the crucifixion across the width of the canvas. At left, a close group of mourners contrasts with a looser cluster at right. Beneath the centre, the ground steps downward into the foreground. These choices direct attention from the three figures above to very different responses below. [1][3]
The scene contains more than the central religious event. Mantegna's design includes a crowd, horses, rocks and a distant city, and the French collection record identifies soldiers and figures playing dice among the subjects of Degas's copy. The body of Christ remains the highest point of emphasis, but the surrounding people make the Crucifixion a crowded public event. Degas had to handle this complex arrangement on a canvas smaller than a large history painting, balancing the crosses and background with many small figures. [1][3]
The Tours collection record calls Degas's treatment sketchlike. It says he did not reproduce the polished finish of Mantegna's original. That observation is borne out by the visible paint: broad passages in the rocks and groups below the crosses are less tightly described than one might expect of a meticulous facsimile. Copying here meant studying a composition through paint, not mechanically tracing every detail. [1]
The colour creates another path through the image. Pale figures and yellowed wood stand against blue sky; warm rust-coloured rock rises behind the left group and a darker bank encloses the right. Red and blue garments give the people below the crosses small areas of intensity. The distribution keeps the eye moving between the suffering figures above and the dense human scene below. These are observations from the reproduced work, not claims about how the canvas looks under conservation examination. [1]
Mantegna's original in the Louvre
Andrea Mantegna painted his Crucifixion between 1456 and 1459 as the central part of a lower row, or predella, for the San Zeno altarpiece in Verona. The Louvre holds that original panel as INV 368. It is tempera on poplar wood, 76 × 96 cm. The difference in artist, date, material and accession is fundamental: the Louvre painting supplied Degas's model, while the Tours oil is the nineteenth-century copy discussed here. [3]
The Louvre's record explains that the three main panels of the altarpiece remained in Verona, while the predella panels came to France. The centre, Crucifixion, stayed in the Louvre; the two flanking panels are held in Tours. That later distribution can confuse readers because both Degas's copy and two Mantegna panels are connected with the Tours museum. The original Crucifixion itself is in Paris. [3][4]
Degas could study the Louvre panel directly. The French national collections record notes that he obtained a Louvre copyist's card in 1853 and made copies regularly in his early years. A copyist's training gave him access to earlier artists' solutions to figure arrangement, space and gesture. In this painting, the three crosses and the carefully divided crowd offered an unusually demanding lesson. [1]
The Tours museum's Mantegna exhibition brought Degas's oil together with the predella subject, confirming that curators value the copy as evidence of an artist's close engagement with an older work. It describes the Degas painting as 69 × 92.5 cm, oil on canvas. The museum source thus reinforces the national inventory and fixes the identity of this full composition. [4]
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The French national collections record gives 1861 for the Tours picture. Michel Schulman's Degas catalogue, number MS47, gives a broader 1861–64 range. Both identify the same oil in Tours; they differ about precision of dating. “1861” is used here as the collection's label, while the catalogue range remains an alternative estimate. The painting should not acquire the fifteenth-century date of Mantegna's original. [1][2]
The French record argues for an early date partly because Degas reused the group of holy women from Mantegna in his own Daughter of Jephthah. It also connects this copy to his sustained interest in studying earlier masters. This is more specific than saying simply that Degas was “influenced” by Renaissance art: the collection links one identifiable group in one copied picture to a later composition. The argument depends on curatorial comparison, not a dated inscription painted across this canvas. [1]
The Degas copy survived in his studio and appeared in the first posthumous studio sale in 1918, listed as no. 103. The catalogue then records it with Jeanne Fèvre and in the Tours collection in the twentieth century. Provenance entries are useful for following the object, but the stable reference for a reader now is the museum's inventory 1934-6-1. [2]
Not the Brera drawing
The Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan owns a much smaller Degas drawing titled Ladrone crocifisso (copia da Mantegna). It concentrates on the crucified thief at the right of Mantegna's painting. Brera records pencil on paper, 286 × 250 mm, inventory 947. The drawing's limited subject, support and size distinguish it immediately from the three-cross oil in Tours. [5]
Brera's record notes an inscription referring to the Degas sale, “1 vente n.103,” and explains that this number belongs to the oil copy later acquired by Tours, not to the Brera drawing. The relationship between study and full copy is informative, but it does not collapse them into one object. A photograph of the drawing would leave two crosses and much of the crowd missing from this page. [2][5]
This distinction also helps explain how Degas worked. He could study a single figure in pencil and work through an entire painted composition in oil. Neither exercise had to be a finished religious painting in the same sense as Mantegna's altarpiece panel. Copying, for Degas, was a practical way to understand earlier painting through repeated choices of line, mass and colour. [1][5]
Looking again
Begin with the central cross and move outward to the two thieves. Follow the figures at the foot of each cross, then look beyond them to the city and rocks. The painting's main event is unmistakable, yet the surrounding activities compete for attention. That complexity is part of what made Mantegna's composition worth studying. [1][3]
Degas's Crucifixion after Mantegna is best understood as a specific object and a specific act of learning. It is an early oil on canvas in Tours, linked to Mantegna's Louvre panel and to a separate pencil study in Brera. Its sketchlike handling shows an artist working through an inherited design. The accurate title preserves both makers: Mantegna designed the fifteenth-century source, and Degas made the nineteenth-century painting we see here. [1][3][5]
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References
French Ministry of Culture, Joconde/POP record for Degas, Le Calvaire d'après Mantegna, Tours 1934-6-1, owner-supplied inventory, 1861 date, materials, dimensions and curatorial discussion. View source
Michel Schulman, Degas digital catalogue, Le Calvaire d'après Mantegna, MS47, wider date estimate and documented later history. View source
Musée du Louvre, Andrea Mantegna, La Crucifixion, INV 368, original panel and San Zeno altarpiece context. View source
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours, Mantegna predella exhibition dossier, identifies Degas's oil copy in the museum and the related Mantegna predella panels. View source
Pinacoteca di Brera, Degas, Ladrone crocifisso (copia da Mantegna), separate pencil study and clarification of the Degas sale inscription. View source
Edgar Degas, The Crucifixion after Mantegna, 1861 (collection record; Schulman 1861–64), oil on canvas. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours, 1934-6-1. Collection record. View source
Tom Gurney is an art history expert. He received a BSc (Hons) degree from Salford University, UK, and has also studied famous artists and art movements for over 20 years.
Tom has also published a number of books related to art history and continues to contribute to a number of different art websites. You can read more on Tom Gurney here.
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