Hardly any other symbol has shaped Western art history as fundamentally as the cross. What began as a cruel tool of Roman execution practice became the central symbol of Christianity – and one of the most versatile motifs in European art. A journey through two millennia of pictorial history.
There are symbols that we have seen so often that we have stopped really noticing them. The cross is one of them. It hangs on church walls and museum façades, adorns altar rooms and pieces of jewelry, appears in modernist abstraction as well as in medieval goldsmith’s work. And yet behind this seemingly simple form – two intersecting lines – lies one of the most complex pictorial histories of mankind.
For the cross was not initially a religious symbol, but an instrument of death. The Roman crucifixion was one of the most brutal methods of execution in antiquity, deliberately staged in a public and dishonorable manner. The fact that this symbol of all things became the emblem of a world religion is, historically speaking, one of the most astonishing reinterpretations of all – and art has accompanied, documented and helped shape this transformation process for centuries.
From disgrace to sacred symbol: The early centuries
In the first centuries of Christianity, the cross barely appeared in the visual arts. The early Christians, who suffered persecution, made use of other symbols – the fish, the lamb, the anchor. The cross was too laden with shame and torture to be used openly as a symbol.
This only changed after the Edict of Milan in 313, which guaranteed Christians religious freedom in the Roman Empire. Emperor Constantine had the cross minted on coins and attached to field signs. Since then, an artistic process of transfiguration began: the cross was gilded, set with precious stones and immortalized in mosaics. This is particularly impressive in the so-called crux gemmata, the precious stone cross, as can be seen in the mosaics of Sant’Apollinare in Classe in Ravenna from the 6th century – a radiant, precious cross that proclaims not suffering but triumph. The death of Christ was deliberately ignored in this early imagery; what mattered was the resurrection.
Pain and humanity: the crucifix in the Middle Ages
This changed fundamentally in the High Middle Ages. The more theology focused on the sacrificial death of Christ, the more incarnate art became. The living, triumphant Christ on the cross gave way to another representation: the suffering, dying, bleeding body.
The Gero cross in Cologne Cathedral, created around 970, is considered one of the earliest examples of this new pictorial language. It shows Christ not as a victor, but as a man dying – his head bowed, his body heavy. This shift was not an artistic fashion, but a theological statement: God has truly suffered. This message was intended to strike an emotional and existential chord with the faithful.
The suffering crucifix reached its peak in the late Gothic period. Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (completed around 1515) is perhaps the most radical work in Western art history in this respect. Grünewald’s Christ is covered in wounds, the body distorted, the hands cramped. The work was created for an Antonite monastery that cared for plague sufferers and those afflicted with skin diseases – the patients were supposed to recognize their own suffering in Christ’s body. Rarely has art been so directly oriented towards comfort through compassion.
Abstraction and reinvention: The cross in the modern age
With the Enlightenment and secularization, the cross lost its self-evident religious connection – and thus gained new artistic freedom. In the 20th century, it became an object of formal investigation, political charge and spiritual reinvention. Piet Mondrian, who came from a strict Calvinist family, built his famous grid paintings from horizontal and vertical lines – a structure that inevitably recalls the cross without ever explicitly showing it. Mark Rothko, who conceived his large-format color field paintings as spiritual spaces of experience, spoke openly of a religious mood beyond denominational ties. And Barnett Newman created an abstract passion with his series The Stations of the Cross (1958-1966) – black and white stripes on canvas that evoke the fourteen Stations of the Cross without a single figurative element.
At the same time, the cross became a means of provocation in contemporary art. Andres Serrano’s controversial photograph Piss Christ (1987) showed a crucifix in glowing yellow urine – a picture that triggered massive protests and is still being discussed today. Regardless of one’s own attitude towards it, it makes it clear: even after two millennia, the cross is not a neutral symbol. It touches, hurts, comforts – and provokes.
What keeps the cross so permanently alive as an artistic motif is its complexity. It simultaneously carries death and resurrection, pain and hope, history and the present. No other symbol in the Western pictorial tradition has been rethought, recast and reinterrogated so often. Artists still fall back on it – not because it is comfortable or familiar, but because it still carries something that cannot be translated into any other form. Two lines. Countless meanings.
