The Three Crosses

Christ dies between the two thieves on the hill of Golgotha as a storm of light and darkness bursts over the scene, horsemen and mourners reeling in the glare. Rembrandt drew this drypoint in the early 1650s and reworked the plate obsessively over the following years, creating one of the most dramatic and most sought-after prints in the history of art. Working directly into the copper, he scraped and burnished whole areas of the composition between states until the figures all but vanish into the light, turning the sheet into a demonstration of the expressive range of the medium at its limits.