As is well known, Giorgio Vasari was the first art historian, remembered above all as the author of the lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architects in which he traces the profile of Italian artists from the Middle Ages to Michelangelo, considered the apex of everyone's art. times. The Lives had to change the literature of the sector forever and start the history of art as we understand it today.

As a painter Vasari is the leading exponent of Tuscan Mannerism of the mid-1500s in which grace is the aesthetic ideal of reference, a masterful blend of naturalistic verisimilitude and intellectual quality of beauty.

The picture presented here shows all the elements of Mannerist and Vasari compositional syntax in particular: diagonal cuts, shortened figures, anatomical elongations, acid colors. The figures taken from the half-length become habitual, trespassing into the spectator's space and appearing at the margins of the pictorial space. They are mechanisms of involvement that are enriched with direction solutions aimed at provoking the direct involvement of the spectator. The dramatic action develops through the very close shot, the attention to detail, the contrast between the dignity of Christ and the shame of the cross, the suffering face and the elegance of the pink robe.