JOUVENET, Jean-Baptiste
(b. 1644, Rouen, d. 1717, Paris)

Descent from the Cross

1697
Oil on canvas, 424 x 312 cm
Musée du Louvre, Paris

This bold and vigorous painting, with its magnificent harmony of warm colours, foreshadows the most beautiful of the nineteenth-century Romantic Paintings. Executed for the church of the Capuchins in the Place Louis -le-grande, Paris, it was donated to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1756. During the French Revolution, it was acquired by the Louvre, as were all the other paintings which had belonged to the Académie.