The Elevation of the Cross
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Los Angeles County Museum of Art [ LACMA ] |
| Location History: | The Elevation of the Cross by Antonio de Torres has a three-century travel history across continents, moving from colonial Mexico to Spain before its arrival in California.Commissioned as part of a sacred Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) series, Torres completed the painting in Mexico City in 1718. From there, it traveled north to its original destination: the Templo de San Francisco de Asís in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. The artwork remained inside this Franciscan convent church for nearly two hundred years, surviving the regional political upheavals and church property confiscations of the 19th century.The painting transitioned into private hands in 1903 when it was acquired by Joaquín Arguinzoniz y Díez Gutiérrez, a prominent resident of San Luis Potosí. To protect their estate from the violence of the Mexican Revolution, the Arguinzoniz family packed up their belongings and shipped the canvas across the Atlantic Ocean to Durango, Spain, around 1914. For the next century, the masterpiece remained hidden from the public eye and art historians, passed down quietly through generations of the family between Durango and Bilbao, Spain.The artwork finally reemerged on the global stage in 2016. Recognizing its historical significance, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) purchased the painting during its annual Collectors Committee event. Following extensive conservation efforts to repair the wear and tear of its transatlantic travels, the painting now resides permanently in Los Angeles, California. |
The Elevation of the Cross (La elevación de la cruz) is an oil-on-canvas painting completed in 1718 by the Mexican Baroque artist Antonio de Torres (1667–1731). The composition captures a moment of raw physical and emotional strain: figures heave the cross upright while Christ hangs upon it, his body caught between suffering and stillness. Around him, the Virgin Mary and the disciples turn their eyes away, overwhelmed by grief, while Roman soldiers usher in the two thieves who will soon be crucified alongside him. Torres deliberately gave the faces of Christ and the Virgin a smoother, more polished finish than the rest of the composition, a technique that draws the viewer's attention to their shared anguish and visually binds the two figures together despite the surrounding chaos. The painting was originally created as part of a larger Via Crucis, or Way of the Cross series, commissioned for the Franciscan convent church of San Luis Potosí, one of the grandest and most richly appointed religious institutions in all of New Spain. These sequential paintings functioned almost like visual storyboards, allowing worshippers to pause before each canvas, imagine themselves present at that stage of Christ's Passion, and deepen their sense of compassion through meditation. Torres himself belonged to the Third Order of Saint Francis, a connection that brought him numerous commissions from Franciscan institutions across the prosperous mining regions of San Luis Potosí and Zacatecas. (The Elevation of the Cross (La elevación de la cruz) After changing hands over the centuries — including a period when the painting left Mexico for Spain amid the upheavals of independence and revolution — the work eventually entered the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2016, where it remains today.
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